Hello and welcome back to First Principles. This is the 47th episode since we started, or the 6th episode of season 3.

In this episode, I sit down with Rahul Matthan, a co-founder of Trilegal, one of India’s largest and most successful full-service law firms. While Rahul starts by questioning if a lawyer can be an entrepreneur, the conversation unfolds into a masterclass on the patient, principled art of building a lasting institution.

Rahul provides a rare, inside look into the unique challenges of building a professional services firm—a business where the people are the product. He breaks down the counterintuitive models Trilegal adopted to foster a culture of collaboration over individual stardom. We explore their radical “all-equity partnership” and the “lockstep” compensation model, designed to de-risk the firm from becoming dependent on individual “rainmakers” and to align everyone’s incentives towards collective success.

A key theme is the power of compounding principles. Rahul explains how foundational decisions made 25 years ago, such as not naming the firm after its founders and instilling a “firm before self” ethos, were critical for long-term, sustainable growth. He also shares the story behind Trilegal’s exponential 3X growth during the COVID period, attributing it not just to market demand but to a crucial, planned transition from a founder-led management to a new leadership team built for scale.

Finally, Rahul offers a nuanced and critical perspective on the impact of AI on the legal profession. He argues that the real disruption won’t be in replacing senior experts, but in hollowing out the training ground for junior associates, posing a fundamental challenge to the apprenticeship model that professions rely on.

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This is the 2nd part of my conversation with him.

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This episode was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

In this episode, Rohin Dharmakumar sits down with Rahul Matthan, a co-founder of Trilegal, one of India’s largest and most successful full-service law firms. While Rahul starts by questioning if a lawyer can be an entrepreneur, the conversation unfolds into a masterclass on the patient, principled art of building a lasting institution.

Rahul provides a rare, inside look into the unique challenges of building a professional services firm—a business where the people are the product. He breaks down the counterintuitive models Trilegal adopted to foster a culture of collaboration over individual stardom. We explore their radical “all-equity partnership” and the “lockstep” compensation model, designed to de-risk the firm from becoming dependent on individual “rainmakers” and to align everyone’s incentives towards collective success.

A key theme is the power of compounding principles. Rahul explains how foundational decisions made 25 years ago, such as not naming the firm after its founders and instilling a “firm before self” ethos, were critical for long-term, sustainable growth. He also shares the story behind Trilegal’s exponential 3X growth during the COVID period, attributing it not just to market demand but to a crucial, planned transition from a founder-led management to a new leadership team built for scale.

Finally, Rahul offers a nuanced and critical perspective on the impact of AI on the legal profession. He argues that the real disruption won’t be in replacing senior experts, but in hollowing out the training ground for junior associates, posing a fundamental challenge to the apprenticeship model that professions rely on.

This episode was mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Hello and welcome back to First Principles. I’m thrilled to bring you episode 46, my conversation with Anand Jain, the co-founder of Mumbai-headquartered customer engagement platform CleverTap.

Anand and I were once colleagues at the media conglomerate Network 18. He got out before I did.

In 2013 he and two of his colleagues, Sunil Thomas and Kondamudi, left Network 18 and decided to fire up their respective laptops and code a new customer engagement platform. In just a few months, WizRocket, as it was then called, found its first – albeit non-paying customer. Then, in fairly short order, word-of-mouth driven inbound Seed and Series A investments.

Over time it became Clevertap, raising over $180M in VC funding and becoming a globally used and respected product.

As it turns out though, one of Clevertap’s operating philosophies is, well, First Principles. A strong reason is because Anand himself is a strong believer in it.

At the age of 12 he lost his dad. Thus, at an age when kids are taught to focus only on studies, Anand started tinkering, repairing and learning computer programming to earn money to put food on the table.

His first business was a scheduling system for lawyers in Ahmedabad, written in FoxPro. That was in 1994.

His friends in college called him “khurpechi” in Hindi. Literally, that’s a person who uses a khurpi – a gardening tool – to turn soil over to weed crops or plants. Colloquially though, that’s a person who is curious, restless and is always meddling around with things that don’t concern them directly.

Along the way, Anand co-founded Burrp, one of India’s first restaurant review portals, which got acquired by Network 18. While he was building and running Burrp, he also started manufacturing and selling pigeon spikes to shops, because he noticed there was no one doing that in India!

“I shouldn’t be here,” he told me. Why, I asked. He is not very smart, he replied. He doesn’t have good educational pedigree. He did not even study computer science formally. But, he said, he is extremely hard working and believes that anything can be learnt through hard work and perseverance.

You can see why First Principles is a concept that is dear to Anand.I asked him how happy he was on a scale of 10. He said 10.

I asked him if he’d ever thought of retiring. He said never. Life is too short to not have fun, he said.

Indeed, it is. So let’s dive into episode 46, with Anand Jain, co-founder of Clevertap.

This is part 2 of my conversation with him

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This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, with mixing and mastering by Rajiv CN.

Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions and guests you would want to see on First Principles.

If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.