From Investing to Building: Reflections on Entrepreneurship

Welcome back to First Principles!

If you’ve been listening to us for a while, you know that First Principles covers a lot of topics. Leadership, organization building, decision making, learning methods, careers, life principles, habits, people management, parenting..it goes on.

But if there’s a common thread that connects them all together, it’s entrepreneurship. Thus, today we have a “supercut” episode about the lives of founders.

You’re probably familiar with our supercut episodes. Every now and then we go back to our earlier episodes and stitch together some of the most interesting conversations from them.

And so, we’ve put together this special supercut episode that takes you through the lives of five accomplished, original and diverse founders. They are Kunal Shah, the founder and CEO of CRED, Srikanth Velamakanni, the co-founder and Group CEO of Fractal, Ronnie Screwvala, the co-founder and Chairperson of UpGrad, Gaurav Munjal, the co-founder and CEO of Unacademy, and Smita Deorah, the co-founder and CEO of LEAD School.

We cover their childhood, their careers and the choices they made, all of which helped them become the people they are today.

Of course, I’ll urge you to go back and listen to our full episodes – but this if you’re not caught up on our older episodes, this is the perfect place to start.

Here’s a quick glance at the conversations in this episode:

I spoke with Kunal earlier this year, in a conversation full of wonderful analogies and sharp perceptions of the world. And how Kunal’s childhood and teenage years, when he was thrust into work to support his family, led him to the core philosophy behind CRED.

Next up is Srikanth Velamakanni, the co-founder and Group CEO of Fractal.

And Srikanth’s childhood, too, is an important part of his journey as a founder. Especially when you consider the fact that growing up, he decided never to go into business. Because his father would often tell him that there was no such thing as an honest businessman.

And yet, in 200o, Srikanth pooled in 2 lakh rupees to build Fractal. That’s right – they’ve been around for nearly 25 years.

Srikanth tells me what changed.

Next, we have Ronnie Screwvala, the chairperson and co-founder of UpGrad. Ronnie’s on the opposite end of the spectrum from Srikanth – growing up, he told his parents he’s never going to work for someone else. Ronnie calls it serendipity – or even karma or destiny, and explains how he went from earning 500 rupees on the weekends to running multiple successful and colourfully varied organisations.

This brings me to Gaurav Munjal, who you will know as the co-founder and CEO of Unacademy. And his story starts in college – when he ran a very successful blog devoted to - wait for this -  the actress Priyanka Chopra. And then a facebook page that earned him thousands of dollars from ads.

He was a content creator before it was even a profession — and he explains how this led to Unacademy.

Lastly, we have Smita Deorah, the co-founder and CEO of LEAD school. Like Gaurav and Ronnie, she’s built a massive institution in education, too.

Smita built LEAD school as a way to completely rejig the education system and everything that it’s built of: the curriculum, pedagogy, technology, even the parents’ mindset. And like our other guests, she has a very interesting story driving her too – and it starts when her daughter was only six months old.

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