First Principles The Ken

Alok Mittal has been on both ends of the startup ecosystem. He’s been a founder and a VC. These days he’s back in the founder’s seat but still enabling businesses but through his lending platform Indifi which lends money to Small and Medium Enterprises or SMEs.

He has very strong thoughts about org building even though he admits Indifi is only 9 years old. He speaks from his observations and his strong beliefs. In Alok’s mind it’s the mid-management which holds together the organization and not necessarily the leadership team.

Alok also has the history of setting up three ventures, which includes the part he played in setting up Canaan Partners, a VC firm in India. Then of course there is JobsAhead which was his first startup and now he’s busy lending to the sector which contributes to 30% of the country’s GDP, and yet finds credit hard to come by.

Alok hung up his VC shoes in 2015 to solve this problem and take on the problem of lending to SMEs, the ones who were being given a pass by traditional banks and NBFCs. But they’re not leaning on solving for every SME out there. Indifi have found the sectors they want to lend to and are working towards making these businesses get access to credit.

He also talked about:

Failures and the learnings it bringsHow he assesses risks as a VC and a founderThe bible of raising moneyAdvice to Young entrepreneurs
Listen to all of that and a whole lot more in this Part 1 episode of our conversation with Alok Mittal.

Welcome to First Principles – The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let’s get started.
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Rebel Foods was incorporated in 2015. Before that it was Faasos and Faasos has been around since 2004. But co-founder and CEO Jaydeep Barman says back in 2004 when he and his co-founder Kallol Banerjee started it, they didn’t look at it as a means of living. It existed to some extent, primarily, to fulfil their own craving for good Calcutta rolls as Pune, where both of them were living at the time, didn't have any nice joints for the same.
A few years after starting it both of them left it behind to go and do their second MBAs from INSEAD and after completing it Jaydeep went on to work for McKinsey in London and Kallol headed to Bosch in Singapore.

But the dream of having their own company brought them back to Pune in 2011 and this time they were serious about making Faasos huge. They wanted to make it a QSR chain in the image of McDonald’s and Dominos of the world, but catering to the Indian taste buds. They raised some venture capital and got a few angel investors and decided to fire up their journey to growing their store numbers and serving great food.
But this journey hit a roadblock when they grew too fast and revenue didn’t match up growth on a per store basis. This is when they had the first of their ‘lightbulb moments or epiphanies’ as Jaydeep calls them.
Infrastructure or setting up a restaurant on the high street was a fixed cost that made it hard for Rebel Foods to scale beyond a point. So they decided to enforce a change in how they do business by taking away this fixed cost component and just investing in making food in a kitchen ideally in a location where rent is low.
This decision was aided by customer insight as well. When they ran a survey nearly 74% customers said they had never been to a Faasos outlet or they had been to it once. So they piloted the cloud kitchen or ghost kitchen concept, which meant you just have a kitchen which fulfils orders and no storefront or dine-in area, in Mumbai and it worked and they haven’t turned back from there.
There were two more lightbulb moments which have made Rebel Foods what it is today. What were those?
Find out that and a lot more in this episode full of a lot of 2x2 matrix examples, possibly one of the most fun brand origin stories, how Rebel Foods became the world’s largest Internet restaurant and priceless insights into the world of serving food without a restaurant that you and I can dine-in.
Welcome to First Principles – The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.
Let’s get started.
The Ken completed the training of 100 senior leaders from high-growth Indian companies last month. Read more about our learning programs for leaders here. Sign up by filling out this form. We have a few slots available this year.
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When Chetan Maini – co-founder and chairman of SUN Mobility – stepped down as Mahindra Reva CEO in 2015, he wasn’t thinking what was the next venture to start. In fact even though he stepped down he was still involved in the space.
His time was still spent in understanding the possibilities electric mobility could unlock for the world and how these possibilities were being explored around the world. He was still involved in setting up and innovating the Formula E division at Mahindra, he still helped Anand Mahindra every now and then on strategic matters in Mahindra’s electric division, he was working with the government, he also helped the BMTC take a part of its fleet electric and the list goes on.

One could say he stepped down to get a better view of the possibilities in electric mobility. He was not looking for opportunities actively during this period, he was merely synthesising what possibilities were feasible.
He did travel across the world during this break but even during that time he was looking at the electric mobility solutions and innovations that were present in the places he visited.
He realised the possibilities in battery swapping as an alternative to charging and filed patents long before he became part of what is SUN Mobility today.
In the first part of our conversation with Chetan we discussed broadly how the sector has evolved, what SUN Mobility has set out to achieve, how their BaaS or Battery as a Service model is an alternative to charging your vehicle and a whole lot more.
In this episode we discuss how Chetan figured out what was next for him, the mental models he applies at SUN Mobility, how he’s built a team that speaks its mind and a lot more.
Welcome to First Principles – The weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.

Let’s get started.

What does your company do?

There are many ways to answer this question.

Most founders have a really good answer, some have a meandering one.

Well, let’s just say it’s always a compelling answer.

This week we have five founders to answer that question on a broader range. They function in very competitive sectors and are successfully making their mark in their respective sectors by innovating and more appropriately reinventing the wheel.

First up, we have newly inducted Shark, Radhika Gupta of Edelweiss Asset Management telling us what her company does for its customers, and what she doesn’t want her customers to not do through a great example.

Next up, we have Lalit Keshre of Groww, who is very clear who the target consumer for his company is. Starting off as robo-advisory and then pivoting into the mutual fund sector and now on their way to become a complete financial services platform.

We have another Shark from the Shark Tank panel featured in this episode. Ritesh Agarwal of Oyo Rooms has built Oyo in his own words into a leading global hotel brand. But that’s not all it is as he went on to add further.

Next up, we have Kartik Jayaraman, who founded Waycool, a food and agritech company  at the age of 40. He started off  with the simple explanation: We’re a supply chain company. At our heart that’s what we do. After that he got into the nitty gritty of what Waycool does.
Lastly, we have Niraj Singh of Spinny, who is busy building in a space that has many competitors, old and new, and he explained how he’s servicing the aspirational class of the country by delivering something the competitors couldn’t.
The Ken completed the training of 100 senior leaders from high-growth Indian companies last month. Read more about our learning programs for leaders here. Sign up by filling out this form. We have a few slots available this year.
Welcome to First Principles—the weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.
Let’s get started.

Our guest for this episode has a very specific weekly routine. 
Pilates - once a week.
Strength training - once a week.
Aqua therapy - once a week
Functional training, swimming, breathing exercises, meditating daily with just a little trouble
Golfing three times a week followed up with posture exercises 
And very recently, experimenting with intermittent fasting.
Maybe you’re imagining a very specific type of person. A really fit, disciplined person – perhaps, a fitness influencer?
Well, you ‘re kind of right. You could say the person I’m talking about is very much an influencer. And he’s fit too.
He’s huge on LinkedIn, where he is part of the Top Voice program. On Twitter or X, he has close to a million followers. He’s very popular online.
So, really, if you think about it, he could turn into a fitness influencer if he wanted to.
But, here’s the thing. We're not talking about a young, health obsessed fitness influencer.
This is the routine of a 72-year-old, health obsessed, and I must add restless founder and Chairman of Marico, Harsh Mariwala.
Welcome to First Principles, the weekly leadership podcast from The Ken. I’m your host Rohin Dharmakumar and this is part 2 of my conversation with Harsh Mariwala.
This is episode 45 of First Principles–The Ken’s weekly leadership podcast. Let’s get started. Let’s begin.
 

Chetan Maini, the co-founder and Chairman of Sun Mobility has done a whole lot in his life. He’s been forever a tinkerer as you’re bound to find out if you read his father Dr.S.K.Maini’s book REVA: India’s Green Gift to the World.
Chetan’s raced solar cars, built his own car company REVA and is now building a pay-as-you-go energy infrastructure for a greener future with Sun Mobility. You’ll see in this a proper evolution of owning the chain of control as well.
Well, it has to be said this is not fully intentional. Because in a world where REVAs are speeding down the road left and right you’re not gonna see Chetan going out and building a BaaS, battery as a service business. But it was 2001, and India, and most of the world, was not ready for electric cars.
Chetan, however, persevered even under the shadow of the Mahindra Group and made strides in their electric mobility aspirations before leaving in 2015.
He took a break of two years, observed the EV market across the globe and when he saw the opportunity back home, came back with his expertise and took charge to create what we know today as Sun Mobility. The vision is bigger this time around and time is on his side as well. 
The only thing left to see out: Execution.
And they are not pulling any punches on that front either.
Additional reading: this edition of Green Margins published way back in late 2022 to understand how, here.
Welcome to Season 2, episode 44 of First Principles - A weekly leadership podcast from The Ken.