First Principles The Ken

Our guest for this episode, Radhika Gupta, describes Edelweiss AMC—or any mutual fund company, for that matter—as a company that solves financial problems for customers. Simple. Going into anything else, she says, is way too complicated.

Edelweiss operates in a crowded market with nearly 50 players. And it's surrounded by giants, rivals much larger than itself.

But that also gives it the space to take risks and bets that larger companies might not.

That’s how Edelweiss pulled Bharat Bonds into their armour, which shot up their assets massively. It went from number 30 in the mutual fund rankings to number 13 in just a few years.

As a CEO, Radhika is a big fan of keeping things simple and effective.

She has a straightforward way of dealing with workplace politics. A one-step way to shut down mansplaining. A very simple approach to trying to understand her consumers. And even an easy but brilliant way of organising her favourite poetry, excerpts and stories!

In this episode, we talk about:

What is the problem that Edelweiss is trying to solve?


How does Radihka define success?


How Radhika uses an inner scorecard to evaluate herself


How does she deal with criticism and separate constructive criticism from targeted bias?


Why Radhika doesn’t believe in work-life balance


Why Radhika has a third category of priorities after personal and professional


Radhika’s advice for young, professional women

This is Episode 26 of First Principles, with Radhika Gupta — The Ken’s fortnightly leadership podcast.
The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here.

BillDesk does not have a CEO.

Instead, it just has three co-founders: MN Srinivasu, Ajay Kaushal and Karthik Ganapathy. And they don’t have separate designations.

In fact, BillDesk has no formal hierarchies or designations. People are hired as members of a team. That’s it.

More than two decades after they started the company, the three co-founders continue to work from a single desk in the same room.
For a 23-year-old organisation that handles over $150 billion in payments, BillDesk is surprisingly lean at just over 800 employees. And that's not the only thing contrarian about it. It has been profitable for over a decade and a half now. 

When I asked Vasu—that’s how others usually address Srinivasu—how old he was, his answer was, “BillDesk is 23, I am 55.”

For this episode, we threw in many new questions based on the subscriber feedback I’d been receiving.

What often keeps founders going is the urge to prove something. What is it for Vasu?
How has his view of a leadership team evolved?
How does he prefer to be “managed upward” by his reportees
How has what excites or challenges him changed
Managing people isn’t what founders have in when they start out. And yet, it is the most important thing that determines their success. How has Vasu’s managing style or philosophy evolved since he started Billdesk in 2000?
Over the entire conversation, we also talk about:

Why BillDesk doesn’t handle person-to-person payments, for instance, via UPI.
How the three co-founders hired and coached their first 100 employees
Why BillDesk does not incentivise chasing glory metrics
Why the three co-founders continue to work from a single table even today
Snigdha breaks down the story of Disney's decline, on our business podcast Daybreak. Listen here.
This is Episode 25 of First Principles, with MN Srinivasu — The Ken’s fortnightly leadership podcast.
The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here.

The business currently known as Clear used to be known as Cleartax before. It started out in 2011 as a minimal, sleek and blazingly fast website to help Indians file taxes. Today, it does much more than just people's taxes, even though its overwhelming market leadership means competitors are just "rounding errors," according to Archit Gupta, the company's co-founder and CEO.

Operating largely below the funding and valuation radars of 2020-2022, Clear has been quietly effecting a business model pivot under Archit's leadership. Today, it is overwhelmingly a business-to-business focused company, not a business-to-consumer one. As India digitises and formalises its tax systems together, Clear has ridden both waves to help businesses and consumers stay compliant. But this transition hasn't been quick or easy, as Archit candidly opens up about in our conversation. 

We talk about building a profitable and lasting company and why he turned from a "business-focused" to a "product-focused" CEO a year ago. We also go into how much of a cultural shift it took for Clear to start charging its customers to file taxes – and then, another significant shift: deciding to expand from India to Saudi Arabia. Archit also tells us how he spots excellent talent and much more in this episode.

This is Episode 24 of First Principles, with Archit Gupta — The Ken's fortnightly leadership podcast.

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

In 2023, the business of online comparison platforms seems old-fashioned.

Sure, people may land upon them via search engines, but only some would rarely transact through them. Especially if the products being compared are as life-altering as insurance, right?

Wrong. 

PolicyBazaar—not just India's but the world's largest insurance comparison and transaction platform—proves that.

Yashish Dahiya, the co-founder and Group CEO of Policybazaar, takes us through this story in this episode of First Principles.

Policybazaar started in 2008 and is a publicly listed company today. It's the largest in its space by far. Many of the things it does, or how it does, don't fit into the easy patterns we've been used to.

For instance, employees making phone calls to prospective customers is at the core of their business. In an era where we're told phone calls and call centres are a relic of the past.

So, why do they do it?

Yashish attributes this and many other decisions to PolicyBazaar to being fundamentally First Principles-driven. 

Yashish is incredibly energetic and driven. He is a serious sportsman and triathlete. He's also as straight-talking and candid as they come.

In this episode, we talk to Yashish about why he calls PolicyBazaar an education platform and not a comparison one, the "right to win", how he spots and grooms talent and the importance of physical endurance and excellence.
Chapters:

3:49 - Running 22 kms, drying swimming trunks in the car and other practical decisions

7:54 - How and when Yashish learnt about life and health insurance

15:54 - What is PolicyBazaar

18:13 - The problems of the insurance industry

23:55 - The short-term perils of educating the customer too much

28:25 - How does PolicyBazaar detect insurance fraud

37:23 - Is there an ideal claims ratio for a product
 
38:42 - Why PolicyBazaar is grateful to the call-centre model in this day and age

47:50 - You are first a soul, then your body

51:55 - Yashish the father vs. Yashish the co-founder

1:00:26 - Why confusion is as important as curiosity

1:03:15 - How to identify and groom talent

1:05:54 - Building and evolving a company’s culture

1:14:13 - How to mentor people

1:22:21 - Yahish’s go-to First Principles
 
This is Episode 23 of First Principles, with Yashish Dahiya — The Ken's fortnightly leadership podcast.

If you're a regular listener, please share your thoughts about First Principles and help us shape it into something more useful and interesting for you? Take our listener survey here.

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

Most founders on First Principles—The Ken's fortnightly leadership podcast—have also been CEOs. And one of the questions we often ask them is: when to make way for someone else as a CEO?

If leadership is a ladder, we often make the mistake of thinking that the CEO title sits at the apex. 

Instead, leadership is a journey. And the best founders know that to create organisations that outlast them, the CEO title is but one milestone in their journey. The road doesn't end there.

Varun Dua, our guest for this episode, co-founded Acko—a digital-first insurer most recently valued at over $1.4 billion. He was also Acko's CEO before hiring a seasoned insurance industry leader to take over that role.

That's not the only thing different about Varun. 

He freely admits that as a graduate, he was super lazy and had neither a plan for his life nor any interest in being an entrepreneur. His dream at one point was to get hired by eBay or Cleartrip. Thankfully for him, neither of the companies hired him.

So, he ended up starting one company, which morphed into another firm, which morphed into Acko.

Along the way, he went from super lazy to super driven.

In today's episode, Varun reflects on the choices he made in his career and life and talks about how he's preparing for the ones that still lie ahead. 

This is Episode 22 of First Principles with Varun Dua.

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts and much more here: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep

If you started listening to First Principles—The Ken's fortnightly leadership podcast—in 2023, then today's special episode might be something you'll love. 

We went back to guests from episodes 6 to 10 from 2022 and created a supercut episode highlighting some of the most interesting bits from conversations with these accomplished leaders.

We'd urge you to listen to the full episodes, but this is a great place to start if you've been meaning to check out our older episodes but haven't gotten around to it.

We begin with Harshil Mathur, the co-founder and CEO of Razorpay—a fintech giant offering loans, payroll services, and even bank accounts.

Harshil talks about his journey into entrepreneurship, how Razorpay develops products, the importance of deliberately driving company culture, and much more. 

Episode 6: Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur talks about deliberate culture, building to a need, and the principles of product development

Next, we have Vineeta Singh, the co-founder and CEO of SUGAR Cosmetics—one of India's most popular and fastest-growing cosmetics brands.

Vineeta talks about overcoming stereotypes as a female founder, the importance of passion when selecting your workplace, and why hustle, hunger, humour, and humility are key pillars of SUGAR's culture. 

Episode 7: Vineeta Singh of SUGAR Cosmetics talks about building products, educating consumers, and focusing on the long term

And then, we have Amrish Rau, the CEO of Pine Labs—the payments solution provider whose point-of-sale terminals are visible in most Indian shops and stores.

In 2016, Citrus Pay, an online payments provider Amrish co-founded, was acquired by rival PayU for $130 million in cash. It was one of the most significant acquisitions back then. But Amrish says it is also one of his biggest regrets. As a first-time founder, he decided to sell his company too quickly. Amrish tells us why.

Episode 8: Amrish Rau of Pine Labs talks about the differences between being a founder and CEO
Next, we have Amit Agarwal, the co-founder and CEO of NoBroker—the 8-year-old Bengaluru-headquartered real estate platform that wants to disrupt the very concept of brokerage fees.

Amit speaks about entering management consulting as a young MBA because it paid the most, starting a business that almost no investor wanted to fund, convincing notoriously value-minded Indians to pay a subscription fee before finding a rental apartment, and running a frugal organisation with a cockroach mentality.

Episode 9: Amit Agarwal of NoBroker talks about his single-minded mission to disrupt brokerage, building a cockroach company, and why his office address is a secret

And finally, we have Tarun Mehta, the co-founder and CEO of Ather Energy—India's best-known electric scooter maker. 

Tarun speaks about his journey to convince investors of his vision, doing hard things that defied common sense, building an organisation over decades, and why it takes at least three years to make a true impact at work.

Episode 10: Tarun Mehta of Ather Energy talks about doing hard things, going down multi-year rabbit holes, building companies over 30-40 years, and being chief storyteller

The Ken is India's first subscriber-only business journalism platform. 

Check out our deeply reported long-form stories, insightful newsletters, original podcasts, and much more here: https://the-ken.com/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=podcasts&utm_campaign=podcast_ep