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.

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 1 of my conversation with him

-

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.

Premium subscribers of The Ken have full access to ALL our premium audio. They are available exclusively via The Ken’s subscriber apps. If you don’t have them, just download one and log in to unlock everything. Get your premium subscription using this link.

Not a Premium subscriber? You can subscribe to The Ken Premium on Apple Podcasts for an easy monthly price (Rs 299 in India). The channel includes ALL our premium podcasts.

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My first introduction, and indeed my ongoing and recurring one, to Ultraviolette has been personal. For years, driving by the Inner Koramangala Inner Ring Road from where I stay to Indiranagar, the Ultraviolette showroom would always catch my eye on the left. I used to constantly wonder about those really cool bikes hanging from cables in the double-ceiling office, intrigued by what kind of bikes they were.

Coincidentally, Ultraviolette was founded in the same year that The Ken also started. We've both been in Bangalore, both in a similar part of town, for most of that time. And yet, this was our first time meeting in the ninth year of our respective journeys. As Narayan himself beautifully put it, when you're chasing larger goals, time truly goes by incredibly quickly. We'll delve into what that means for a founder and how they perceive the passage of time when building an organisation from the ground up, because, as Narayan notes, time is the biggest limiting factor for a startup, encompassing money and talent, as founders are always trying to "buy time".

We explored Ultraviolette's foundational vision, how his engineering education laid a strong foundation, and how it fostered a passion to build things from an early age, even tinkering with electronics and DIY systems, their early funding challenges when VCs deemed their ambition "a little too risky" in the early stages, as they were trying to compete with entrenched players.

Narayan is also the head of design at Ultraviolette, so naturally, the conversation went in the direction of him defining the Ultraviolette brand's core pillars as design, technology, and performance, with the promise of "bringing you the future faster than the competition".

He shared Ultraviolette’s ambition to expand to Europe this year and address a significant market gap for compelling electric mid-segment motorcycles at price parity with internal combustion engines.

Narayan also revealed that his colleagues often describe him and his co-founder and childhood friend, Niraj, as "paranoid," driven by a deep attention to detail. He constantly pushes his team to ask, "Have we found the optimal solution after discarding all other possibilities?"

The journey of Ultraviolette is one that defies conventional wisdom.

Welcome to First Principles.

-

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.

Premium subscribers of The Ken have full access to ALL our premium audio. They are available exclusively via The Ken’s subscriber apps. If you don’t have them, just download one and log in to unlock everything. Get your premium subscription using this link.

Not a Premium subscriber? You can subscribe to The Ken Premium on Apple Podcasts for an easy monthly price (Rs 299 in India). The channel includes ALL our premium podcasts.

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My first introduction, and indeed my ongoing and recurring one, to Ultraviolette has been personal. For years, driving by the Inner Koramangala Inner Ring Road from where I stay to Indiranagar, the Ultraviolette showroom would always catch my eye on the left. I used to constantly wonder about those really cool bikes hanging from cables in the double-ceiling office, intrigued by what kind of bikes they were.

Coincidentally, Ultraviolette was founded in the same year that The Ken also started. We've both been in Bangalore, both in a similar part of town, for most of that time. And yet, this was our first time meeting in the ninth year of our respective journeys. As Narayan himself beautifully put it, when you're chasing larger goals, time truly goes by incredibly quickly. We'll delve into what that means for a founder and how they perceive the passage of time when building an organisation from the ground up, because, as Narayan notes, time is the biggest limiting factor for a startup, encompassing money and talent, as founders are always trying to "buy time".

We explored Ultraviolette's foundational vision, how his engineering education laid a strong foundation, and how it fostered a passion to build things from an early age, even tinkering with electronics and DIY systems, their early funding challenges when VCs deemed their ambition "a little too risky" in the early stages, as they were trying to compete with entrenched players.

Narayan is also the head of design at Ultraviolette, so naturally, the conversation went in the direction of him defining the Ultraviolette brand's core pillars as design, technology, and performance, with the promise of "bringing you the future faster than the competition".

He shared Ultraviolette’s ambition to expand to Europe this year and address a significant market gap for compelling electric mid-segment motorcycles at price parity with internal combustion engines.

Narayan also revealed that his colleagues often describe him and his co-founder and childhood friend, Niraj, as "paranoid," driven by a deep attention to detail. He constantly pushes his team to ask, "Have we found the optimal solution after discarding all other possibilities?"

The journey of Ultraviolette is one that defies conventional wisdom.

Welcome to First Principles.

-

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.

Premium subscribers of The Ken have full access to ALL our premium audio. They are available exclusively via The Ken’s subscriber apps. If you don’t have them, just download one and log in to unlock everything. Get your premium subscription using this link.

Not a Premium subscriber? You can subscribe to The Ken Premium on Apple Podcasts for an easy monthly price (Rs 299 in India). The channel includes ALL our premium podcasts.

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Manish Sabharwal isn’t an easy man to nail down. By that, I don’t just mean it was hard to nail down a time on his calendar to meet me for the podcast, which it was. Like with most founders and guests on First Principles, the gap between when I first invite them and when they finally appear is usually measured in months, sometimes years. I had first emailed Manish for First Principles in January 2023.

But I’m saying Manish is hard to nail down also because he defies - resists - categorisation.

Sure, he co-founded Teamlease, one of India’s largest recruitment and human resource providers. It employs over 400,000 people, is listed on the stock exchanges, and is a great barometer of broader employment trends in India.

But Manish is no longer involved with the day-to-day operations of the company, while still being the largest individual shareholder.

Instead, he leads a “portfolio life”, dividing his time serving on the boards of think tanks, regulatory bodies, universities, non-profits, and even private companies like Phonepe; advising companies and the government on a host of topics like labour markets, regulation, employment, education, economic policy and reforms; being a columnist; and reading books.

Oh yeah, he says he’s read a book a week for the last - wait for this - 42 years!

Thus, when I sat down with Manish last Thursday, I went in prepared, or as prepared as I could be, with my research and questions. But 10 minutes into the conversation, I decided to drop the conversation narrative I had in mind and instead let the conversation go where it needed to.

Yes, we do cover entrepreneurship, ambition, and finding product-market fit by letting your customers guide your evolution, but we also go much further into topics that we normally don’t. For example, India’s macroeconomic and geopolitical chances, ‘regulatory cholesterol’, higher education and the jobs crisis. All peppered with pithy aphorisms, vivid analogies, and memorable quotes every few minutes, this is something I’ve remembered Manish doing since I first met him as a journalist in the early 2010s.

Welcome to First Principles.

-

This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, and the mixing and mastering of the episode was done 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 liked this episode, help us spread the word by sharing and gifting this episode with your friends and family.

Premium subscribers of The Ken have full access to ALL our premium audio. They are available exclusively via The Ken’s subscriber apps. If you don’t have them, just download one and log in to unlock everything. Get your premium subscription using this link.

Not a Premium subscriber? You can subscribe to The Ken Premium on Apple Podcasts for an easy monthly price (Rs 299 in India). The channel includes ALL our premium podcasts.

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Manish Sabharwal isn’t an easy man to nail down. By that, I don’t just mean it was hard to nail down a time on his calendar to meet me for the podcast, which it was. Like with most founders and guests on First Principles, the gap between when I first invite them and when they finally appear is usually measured in months, sometimes years. I had first emailed Manish for First Principles in January 2023.

But I’m saying Manish is hard to nail down also because he defies - resists - categorisation.

Sure, he co-founded Teamlease, one of India’s largest recruitment and human resource providers. It employs over 400,000 people, is listed on the stock exchanges, and is a great barometer of broader employment trends in India.

But Manish is no longer involved with the day-to-day operations of the company, while still being the largest individual shareholder.

Instead, he leads a “portfolio life”, dividing his time serving on the boards of think tanks, regulatory bodies, universities, non-profits, and even private companies like Phonepe; advising companies and the government on a host of topics like labour markets, regulation, employment, education, economic policy and reforms; being a columnist; and reading books.

Oh yeah, he says he’s read a book a week for the last - wait for this - 42 years!

Thus, when I sat down with Manish last Thursday, I went in prepared, or as prepared as I could be, with my research and questions. But 10 minutes into the conversation, I decided to drop the conversation narrative I had in mind and instead let the conversation go where it needed to.

Yes, we do cover entrepreneurship, ambition, and finding product-market fit by letting your customers guide your evolution, but we also go much further into topics that we normally don’t. For example, India’s macroeconomic and geopolitical chances, ‘regulatory cholesterol’, higher education and the jobs crisis. All peppered with pithy aphorisms, vivid analogies, and memorable quotes every few minutes, this is something I’ve remembered Manish doing since I first met him as a journalist in the early 2010s.

Welcome to First Principles.

-

This episode was produced by Hari Krishna, and the mixing and mastering of the episode was done 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 liked this episode, help us spread the word by sharing and gifting this episode with your friends and family.