Part 1: Kuku's Lal Chand Bisu on killing three products, ditching the free tier and charging Bharat ₹399 a year

More from First Principles

1. 

   S3 · E14 · 22 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 4 min

   Part 2: Impresario's Riyaaz Amlani on digital landlords, doers & divas, and why delivery will never eat dine-in

   Part 2 moves from the journey to the operating philosophy. Riyaaz Amlani unpacks his evolving stance on the aggregators — from resistance to "uneasy truce" — and the hard lesson that restaurateurs who send guests to Zomato and Swiggy have only themselves to blame. He argues delivery and dine-in are two different businesses, lays out his ambition to turn Impresario into a full-service-restaurant platform, and gets personal on hiring, Gen Alpha kids, weekends, and why his life scores 9.9 out of 10. CHAPTERS 00:00 Recap and what's ahead: aggregators, the platform, the missing 0.1 01:48 "Digital…

2. 

   S3 · E14 · 15 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 4 min

   Part 1: Impresario's Riyaaz Amlani on Mocha, "Handmade," four near-deaths and 25 years of building places to be

   Part 1 of Rohin Dharmakumar's conversation with Riyaaz Amlani is the origin story: why a returning UCLA grad decided Bombay was missing "places to be," how Mocha became Social, and what it actually takes to keep a restaurant group alive for 25 years in the highest-mortality business there is. The shisha ban, the private-equity money that never arrived, COVID, the marble hustle at age six, and the real engine underneath it all: people. CHAPTERS 00:00 Intro: 95% fail by year two — and the man who didn't 01:46 Why Mocha in 2001: a city missing "places to be" 03:23 Bombay the "coolest cousin";…

3. 

   S3 · E13 · 4 May 2026 · 1 hr 15 min

   Part 2: Kuku’s Lal Chand Bisu on the Bathoth-to-Bandra arc, learning from iterations not books, and why nos beat yeses

   Part 2 picks up exactly where I left Bisu — on why a 7-year-old audio platform is releasing a theatrical film on May 8. From there, we go everywhere. Bisu's actual journey from a small village in Shekhawati to Bandra. The "full equation" view of metrics. Why saying no requires more work than saying yes. Why most of his learning comes from iterations, not books. And, in his closing answer, a quietly devastating line about the startup ecosystem itself. If you haven't heard Part 1 yet, please go back and start there first. Chapter list 01:02 — Indian Institute of Zombies : why theatrical, why…

4. 

   S3 · E12 · 30 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 3 min

   Part 2: Curefoods' Ankit Nagori on why Indians only eat healthy Monday to Thursday, focusing on brand over scale, and what drives him now

   Welcome back to First Principles . This is Part 2 of our full conversation with Ankit Nagori, founder and CEO of Curefoods. If you have not listened to Part 1, go back and start there. In this half, the conversation slows down a little and gets even more interesting. Ankit has strong opinions about why healthy food will always lose to biryani on a Friday night, what building a brand people actually love looks like, and what a Unilever of foods means to him. He is also candid about how he hires, how he spends his Sundays with his son, and what drives him beyond the business. _________ This…

5. 

   S3 · E12 · 23 Mar 2026 · 54 min

   Part 1: Curefoods' Ankit Nagori on cold emailing his way into Flipkart, designing for talent density, and surviving a pandemic on 2 crores a month

   Welcome to First Principles . This is Part 1 of our full conversation with Ankit Nagori, founder and CEO of Curefoods. Ankit joined Flipkart as the 22nd employee after cold emailing its founders at a book fair with almost no relevant experience and within six years he was Chief Business Officer. He then co-founded Cult with Mukesh Bansal, built it into one of India's most recognised fitness brands, and spun out Curefoods in the middle of a pandemic when the business was down to 2 crores a month. In this half, Rohin and Ankit get into what those Flipkart years really felt like, what talent…

6. 

   S3 · E11 · 2 Mar 2026 · 58 min

   Part 2: Captain Fresh's Utham Gowda on seafood as the world's last unorganised trillion-dollar industry, why undervaluation is a founder's superpower and his “reverse career path”

   Welcome to First Principles! This is part 2 of episode 52, the full conversation. Rohin met Utham Gowda at Spacebot Studio in Indiranagar on a Tuesday afternoon. Utham was compact, measured, and precise in the way he spoke, like someone who has spent years learning when to talk and when to listen. What's striking was how quickly he opened up. Within the first half hour of the conversation, you got the sense that this is someone who has thought very deeply about his own life, his choices, and what drives him. It makes for one of the best examples on this podcast of a guest easing into a…

7. 

   S3 · E19 · 28 Sep 2026 · 14 min

   Season 3

   Summary I have hosted First Principles for four years and 58 episodes, and I have never once stopped to look at it. This episode is me doing that. There is no guest. It runs about fourteen minutes, and it ends with something I need from you. Season 3 started with Vidit Aatrey of Meesho in April 2025 and ended with Mukesh Bansal in August 2026. A lawyer, a banker, a restaurateur and a venture capitalist were guests on a show I had built for founders. The businesses were trucks, fish, kitchens and bikes. And my questions moved away from fundraising and towards where a person came from and how…

8. 

   S3 · E17 · 17 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 3 min

   Part 2: Mukesh Bansal on hiring for loyalty to a mission, "no means not now", writing three books, and compounding sideways

   Where Part 1 followed the companies, Part 2 is about the person behind them. Picking up from Mukesh Bansal's move from one venture to the next, this half gets into how he finds talent ("work with them for six months"), the mental models he runs his life by, and the beliefs underneath them. He explains why rationally no one should start a company, how he processes every rejection as "no means not now", why he writes three books by simply showing up to a blank page, and how he separated the longevity basics he trusts from the biohacking he no longer does. It ends close to home: loyalty as…

9. 

   S3 · E17 · 10 Aug 2026 · 58 min

   Part 1: Mukesh Bansal on founder mode in the AI age, the three kinds of professionals in the AI age, and the Haridwar boy who found entrepreneurship in a library

   Mukesh Bansal has founded and left more companies than most people build in a lifetime, and in Part 1 he explains why. He founded Myntra and sold it to Flipkart; he co-founded Cult.fit and turned fitness into a category; and today he runs the AI company Nurix and the Meraki Labs studio. Asked what he is now, he says "a learner", and admits he gets bored the moment a company starts working. Part 1 traces the thesis and the companies: how he allocates his weeks, why he thinks the AI era rewards the hands-on operator over the people-manager, what Nurix and Fermi are, why Myntra's move into…

10. 

    S3 · E16 · 27 Jul 2026 · 1 hr

    Fireside Ventures' Kanwaljit Singh on the decade at Hindustan Lever that gave him consumer, raising half the fund he could have, and keeping a coach in his sixties

    1 · Summary Part 2 of 2. Part 1 laid out the bet: a fund built only for Indian consumer brands, back when the idea sounded absurd, and the anti-power-law machine Kanwal Singh built to make it work. This half is the person. The near-decade at Hindustan Lever that gave him his love of consumer, the Intel years, and the Paper Boat conviction that taught him to back the founder over the idea. Then the man himself: parents who came to India as refugees from Pakistan, a father who kept collecting degrees while feeding the family, the coach he started seeing in his sixties and what separates…

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