First Principles is a weekly interview podcast comprising authentic, candid, and insightful conversations between some of India’s most accomplished founders and business leaders, and Rohin Dharmakumar, The Ken’s CEO & co-founder. From personal philosophies, mental models and decision making frameworks, to reading habits, parenting styles or personal interests, each episode will delve into what makes each of these leaders unique.
Required Pod Score for this podcast. PitchCentric checks your profile against host openness, topical fit, and audience signals before you generate a pitch.
Contact path
Verified email
Booking probability
43%
Guest openness
Selective
Sign up to generate a grounded pitch for First Principles.
Signup to Generate a PitchFirst Principles is a weekly interview podcast comprising authentic, candid, and insightful conversations between some of India’s most accomplished founders and business leaders, and Rohin Dharmakumar, The Ken’s CEO & co-founder. From personal philosophies, mental models and decision making frameworks, to reading habits, parenting styles or personal interests, each episode will delve into what makes each of these leaders unique.
First Principles is hosted by The Ken. The show has published 130 episodes to date.
Recent episodes include "Season 3" (28 September 2026, 14 minutes), "Part 2: Mukesh Bansal on hiring for loyalty to a mission, "no means not now", writing three books, and compounding sideways" (17 August 2026, 63 minutes), and "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" (10 August 2026, 58 minutes).
First Principles publishes roughly weekly, with episodes averaging 79 minutes across 130 episodes.
Booking probability for First Principles is 43%, and the host is rated Selective on guests. First Principles requires a Pod Score of 80 or higher. First Principles's contact route on record: verified email.
The strongest fits for First Principles are Business & Management Consulting. First Principles has a business audience.
The Ken hosts First Principles, a business podcast with 130 episodes published.
Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.
Episode #19
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...
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")...
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...
When Mukesh Bansal is asked what he is now, he doesn't say founder or investor. He says "a learner", and admits that the moment a company starts working, he gets bored. That restlessness is the thread through a career...
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...
1 · Summary Part 1 of 2. Kanwal Singh is the first venture capitalist to appear on First Principles, and the reason is the bet he made with the fund itself. In 2017, at the peak of the tech boom, he walked away from...
1 · Summary For fifty-odd episodes, First Principles kept venture capitalists off the show, because the conversation tends to drift to the portfolio rather than the person. Kanwal Singh is the exception. In 2017, at the...
Part 2 of 2. In Part 1 we walked the road from 2011 — three companies, an investor ultimatum, and the capital it took to build. Part 2 is the mind. Saahil Goel starts with what, given hindsight, he'd do differently...
Part 1 of 2. Most people date Shiprocket to 2017; in truth it was born in 2011, and the road there runs through two companies called KartRocket and Craftly. Saahil Goel walks Rohin through the build: Rs 15 lakh of their...
Everyone thinks Shiprocket began in 2017. But the company Saahil Goel and his co-founder Gautam Kapoor started was born in 2011, and it was rebuilt three times before it worked: a “Shopify for India” called KartRocket...
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...
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...
Episode #14
In a business with the highest mortality rate of any, Riyaaz Amlani has spent 25 years building Impresario into 80+ restaurants across 20 cities — Social, Smokehouse Delhi, Antisocial, Bandra Born, Mocha — serving 8...
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...
Lal Chand Bisu and three batchmates from IIT Jodhpur started Kuku FM in audio in June 2018. Almost everyone wrote them off — the louder competitor was getting the press, the VCs didn't believe vernacular India would pay...
Lal Chand Bisu started Kuku in audio in 2018. Almost everyone in the press wrote them off — the louder competitor was getting the headlines, the VCs didn't believe vernacular India would pay, and the assumption was that...
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...
Episode #12
" I can't tell you what those years feel like. It was just a breeze. The camaraderie, the talent density. To be able to assemble that team at one place during a short period was the reason why Flipkart got to the...
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...
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...
Recent guests on First Principles. Study who booked and why before you pitch.
PitchCentric classifies First Principles under these industries. Guests from them are the closest fit, and each links to the best podcasts in that industry.
Shows with the most semantically similar episode content. Pitch one, pitch all; producers cluster.
First Principles
But First, Principles!
The Entrepreneur Speaks Podcast
The Manav Podcast
Fireside with Founders & Leaders
Indian Business Podcast
Guides and articles for guests pitching shows like this one.
Is this podcast yours and you'd like to remove or correct details? Request removal or email privacy@pitchcentric.com.
Questions about the free trial? See the pricing FAQ