| Sunday, 06 August 2023 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
I hope your Sunday is adequately filled with the sounds of soft music, sights of lazing pets, and aromas of ground coffee, into which hopefully one could add the reading of edition #7 of the First Principles newsletter. 🙂
I’m back in Bengaluru after spending three hectic but fulfilling days meeting with a set of diverse and accomplished founders and executives in New Delhi, Gurugram, and Noida. Compared to Bengaluru, the scale, energy, and drive that I see each time I visit the three cities that largely make up the National Capital Region (NCR) always amazes me.
Strangely, I come back energised as an entrepreneur and journalist. The vibe I see within, and outside, NCR’s gigantic office buildings is busy, intense, and constantly hustling. Ambition is visible at all levels—personal or organisational, employee or founder. In recent times, that seems to be much more muted in Bengaluru, where we are more “chilled out.”
Enough about my unscientific views, let’s talk First Principles.
For this edition, I reached out to Amit Agarwal, the gregarious and voluble CEO and co-founder of NoBroker, a real-estate and home services platform that was last valued at over US$1 billion. I first met Amit in 2016, when we’d just started The Ken. His affable and folksy nature was hard to miss even then.
I emailed Amit last week, asking him for his favourite First Principle. He took a few days and emailed me the following (which I’ve only lightly edited for clarity).
[aesop_nutgraf_quote_block title=”As an entrepreneur, me and my co-founders are inherently inclined to taking large bets, and then are always on the look-out for how to quickly scale those bets. While our team takes baby steps in implementation, our role becomes that of allowing them to make mistakes, but always encouraging them to think big… and fast.<br/><br/>
While we do this, I have observed myself often asking to "Invert". I had first read this mental model from Charlie Munger, who said, "Invert, always invert". Munger used it to poke holes in his investment theses to make them sounder.
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I have ended up using them in my entrepreneurship decisions to balance my natural over-optimism.
I enjoy reading The Ken because it is informative, the articles are well researched, well written, without the spin and bias. I admire The Ken team for their dedication to getting closer to the true picture.
Hari Buggana
Chairman and MD, InvAscent
Transparent, Honest, Detailed. To me, The Ken has been this since the day I subscribed to them. The research that they put into each story and the way it is presented is thoroughly interesting. Personally, I’ve always had a great time interacting with the publication and reading the stories.
Harshil Mathur
CEO and Co-Founder, Razorpay
The Ken has proven naysayers wrong by successfully running a digital news publication on a pure-subscription business model in India. They have shown that discerning readers are willing to pay for well-researched, well-written, in-dept news articles.
Kiran Mazumdar Shaw
Executive Chairperson, Biocon Limited
As a designer, it’s easy to get lost in the craft of building products. As a business owner however, keeping up with a rapidly changing landscape is key to saying relevant. The Ken doesn’t just help me stay on top of what’s happening in India(and beyond), but makes it fun to do so.
Rahul Gonsalves
Co-founder and CEO, Obvious Ventures