WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

Before the fame, what were they like? This Stitch'd montage rewinds to the childhoods of Ranbir Kapoor, Kriti Sanon and other well-known Indians from film, music, cricket and business. Ranbir Kapoor recalls Bombay Scottish, canes and duster-on-knuckles discipline, 54.3% in his 10th boards, dropping out of film school in New York and living on a $2 McDonald's menu for lunch and dinner because his father kept him on a tight budget. Kriti Sanon describes being an extremely shy, stage-frightened firstborn who hid in her mother's dupatta - until dance (five years of kathak at Kathak Kendra) gave her a stage. A rapper remembers being a government sub-divisional officer in Himachal Pradesh while writing for an underground Honey Singh; a composer raised by a single mother who rented out his late father's instruments; a cricketer from Mangalore who picked up a plastic bat at two and a half; and a founder from Indore who scaled his father's detergent business from 40 lakhs to ten times that in 18 months. FULL COVERAGE: the captions appear to cover the entire episode. The episode is a voice montage and does not always name each speaker on screen; these notes name only speakers confirmed by the video's title or clearly identifiable from the content itself, and quotes are verbatim from the captions. Sponsor: none stated in the episode. Nothing here is professional advice.

WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

Nikhil Kamath sits down with MakeMyTrip co-founder Rajesh Magow and IHCL (Taj) MD and CEO Puneet Chhatwal, joined by founders Sidharth Gupta of Treebo, Amit Damani of StayVista, Sandhya Chandrasekharayya of Indiahikes and Bhaveeka Bakshi of Boketto Travels, to explain the business of Indian travel. The conversation covers why booking direct is not cheaper under rate parity, why boutique hotels are often better built by outsiders than hoteliers, how AI splits hospitality between automated budget stays and human premium service, and why voice booking could unlock tier-three India. They then take on the big question: why only ten million foreign tourists visit a country with more than forty UNESCO sites, what went wrong in Goa, why tourism being a state subject is the bottleneck, and the playbook to reach a hundred million tourists. The founders add the ground view: group-celebration homestays, twenty-five to fifty room hotels for tier-two and tier-three cities, membership clubs and Gen Z's shift to spiritual, cultural and event travel. FULL COVERAGE: the captions appear to cover the entire episode. All figures and claims are the speakers' own, not independently verified. Sponsor: none stated in the episode description. Nothing here is financial or business advice.

WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

Nikhil Kamath flies to Dalian with a selfish question - his fund invests in energy transition, and energy is not the problem, storing and moving it is. His teachers: Henning Rath, CEO of EnerVenue, a Silicon Valley company commercializing NASA's nickel-hydrogen battery with a gigafactory in Changzhou, and Tang Kun, CEO of HiNa Battery, a 600-person sodium-ion pioneer spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. From what a cell actually is to why the world standardized on LFP despite 14,000 LFP fires in 2025, why solid state is still at technology readiness level four of nine, how China ran a 20-year 'government venture capital' playbook that left BYD and CATL standing, and why both guests tell him the same thing: don't start a car company, start a battery company - and don't build anything that needs lithium or rare earths. $50 million is the entry ticket. FULL COVERAGE: the captions appear to cover the entire episode. All statistics are the speakers' own claims in conversation - treat them as assertions, not verified figures. Sponsor: none stated - Nikhil's podcast runs no ads or sponsors. Nothing here is investment advice.

WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

Recorded in China, Nikhil Kamath sits with two economists who saw today's crises coming: Matthew Klein, who writes The Overshoot and co-wrote Trade Wars Are Class Wars, and Ning Zhu, professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and author of China's Guaranteed Bubble. They cover China's post-COVID economy (growth stepped down from over 9% in the 2000s to around 5% now, with a five-year housing correction dragging on consumption), why China's trade surplus exploded from $100-200 billion a year before the pandemic to about $1.1 trillion now, whether tariffs can fix trade imbalances, why the world keeps funding American debt at 4%, de-dollarization and why stablecoins may actually strengthen the dollar, and how a government-guaranteed housing narrative inflated and then burst China's property bubble. FULL COVERAGE: the captions appear to cover the entire episode. All figures and claims are the speakers' own, not independently verified. Sponsor: none stated in the episode. Nothing here is investment advice.

WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

Nikhil Kamath sits down at the Foundery house in Alibaug with Kishore Biyani and Ronnie Screwvala, 60 days into an experiment: 25 strangers moved into one house, each assigned a new-age consumer brand and 4 crores to build the business in 90 days, with a year of groundwork done before they arrived. This episode is an audit of the model, recorded in front of the cohort. Ronnie traces his path from a Grant Road childhood to cable TV and UTV - 'the coconut has to be broken yourself' - and KB explains why, after compounding 25-30% for decades and then a COVID-era fall, he now believes abundance creates where Ronnie built on scarcity and frugality. They defend the equity split everyone questions (founders keep 25%), the consumer trends the house is betting on (India One's 30 million families, better-for-you foods, new categories, collapsing brand loyalty), celebrity co-created brands like SuperYou, and what happens on the 91st day. Santosh Desai, Lipika, Bilal and cohort founders join with the uncomfortable questions. FULL COVERAGE: the captions appear to cover the entire episode. All views and claims are the speakers' own, not independently verified. Sponsor: none stated. Nothing here is business, investment or professional advice.

WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

Nikhil Kamath sits down with Rajiv Juneja of Mankind (about Rs 40,000 crore revenue, India's fourth-largest pharma company) and G.V. Prasad of Dr. Reddy's (about $3 billion revenue) for a founder-level class on the Indian pharmaceutical business. The conversation spans the industry's real economics - India supplies roughly 60% of the world's generic drug volume but captures only a small single-digit share of its value; the anatomy of a Rs 100 MRP (pharmacy 20%, wholesaler 10%, distributor 2-4%, with 95% of the market being branded generics chosen through rep-doctor relationships); and the Mankind playbook (bottom-up tier-2/3 expansion, prices 40-60% below rivals, 17,000 medical reps, EBITDA deliberately held at 25-26% to fund growth, Manforce as a visibility engine). Prasad gives a science masterclass - APIs vs formulations, small molecules vs biologics vs peptides, why GLP-1 drugs work and why muscle loss is the catch - and a contrarian take on China: India still leads APIs, he says, but China played a long game from cheap intermediates to innovation dominance (29% of new cancer drugs), and India's biologics capability lags. For the 25-year-old founder they map closed doors (online pharmacy, distribution, GLP-1 branding - prescription drugs cannot be advertised in India) and open ones (wellness and prevention growing at 17%, sexual wellness online growing 50-60%, CDMO services riding China+1, AI services pharma cannot staff, even certifying the destruction of expired medicines). Note: YouTube auto-captions garble some names in this episode (Dr. Reddy's appears as 'Deli pharmaceuticals'/'Dr. Eddies', Juneja as 'Junja'). FULL COVERAGE: the captions appear to cover the entire episode. All figures are the speakers' own claims in conversation. Sponsor: none stated. Nothing here is medical or investment advice.

WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

Mati Staniszewski, co-founder of ElevenLabs, joins Nikhil Kamath for a conversation about the voice interface he believes will replace how we interact with technology. ElevenLabs - founded in 2022, split 50/50 between a creative platform (narration, dubbing, localisation) and an agents platform (voice agents for customer experience) - dubbed the Lex Fridman x Narendra Modi podcast, recreates Gordon Ramsay and Chris Voss as AI tutors for MasterClass, and automates roughly 60,000 support calls a day for Meesho in Hindi and English. Mati lays out the three things voice needs before the phone goes back in the pocket (human-level voice quality, knowledge and memory integration, and an unsettled form factor - he bets on behind-ear headphones plus a capture device), why he does not think an AI valuation bubble is brewing (with a caveat on GPU inference providers), and his playbook for young founders: combine deep domain expertise in a lagging industry - automotive, healthcare, e-commerce - with voice agents, as 500 startups in India and 10,000 worldwide already do on ElevenLabs. Nikhil road-tests his social-media idea (a verified, low-bias, algorithm-light network; Mati suggests a voice-first companion interface) and they debate whether a multipolar world kills WhatsApp-scale network effects. FULL COVERAGE: the captions appear to cover the entire episode. All figures are the speakers' own claims in conversation. Sponsor: none stated - Nikhil's podcast runs no ads or sponsors. Nothing here is investment advice.

WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

Nikhil Kamath hosts the eight startups of WTFund Cohort 3 - chosen from 3,000 applications - at his home in Goa after their bootcamp, and asks each founder what they built and which trend made them build it. Sushant and Shubham's Prava Payments is building PSP-agnostic infrastructure so AI agents can actually pay, not just discover. Dr. Jayanti's Astraeus Innovus is developing OncoALERT, a roughly Rs 150 nanotech biosensor for needleless oral-cancer screening designed to work with no electricity, lab or trained staff. A doctor, an engineer and a former ISRO rocket scientist are building a low-cost AI operating system that digitizes pathology slides for diagnostic labs and recommends personalized cancer drug therapies. Sridipto and Sirsho's antimattr wants to be the Android for earbuds and wearables. Rohit's O3 Security, already billing and working with large fintechs, argues 80% of the cybersecurity industry is white-labelled scam. Prashanth and Abhishek's BloomRehab builds home rehabilitation robots for stroke patients. A solo founder's Placestation puts a pick-and-place machine on your desk to cut hardware iteration from two months to a day. And Sahil's Aeyi turns ordinary CCTVs into AI security guards that alert you in real time. The second half is Nikhil unplugged: storytelling, negotiation, hypocrisy, marriage, legacy vs longevity, and why he allocates to energy transition. FULL COVERAGE: the captions appear to cover the entire episode. All traction figures and claims are the founders' own, not independently verified. Sponsor: none stated. Nothing here is investment, medical or professional advice.

WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

Ray Dalio speaks with Nikhil Kamath about money, wealth and investing. They examine how wealth can rise faster than the money available to realize it, how bubbles form, and what that means for young Indian investors. The conversation also covers gold, Bitcoin, portfolio construction, decision rules and the forces shaping markets.

WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

Nikhil Kamath opens the WTF is Finance series with Ruchir Sharma - author of What Went Wrong With Capitalism, founder of Breakout Capital, and formerly Morgan Stanley's global emerging markets head for 25 years. Sharma traces his path from a Navy childhood (Wellington, Coonoor), a Singapore school under Lee Kuan Yew's model, and the 1987 crash at age 13, to writing the Forex Watch column for The Economic Times while hiding that he was an SRCC undergrad, and a $100,000 Morgan Stanley offer in 1996 that ended his PhD plans at 22. The conversation then builds his worldview: capitalism is economic freedom, not equal outcomes; East Asia grew by building infrastructure before welfare states while India's premature welfare and import substitution kept it uncompetitive, reconciling it to roughly 6% growth; regulation is pro-incumbent (America adds 3,000 rules a year and removed about 20 in 20 years; hedge-fund compliance costs are up 10x); and India's real strengths are competitive federalism (Karnataka's rise, Tamil Nadu's bureaucracy) and a potential DOGE-style deregulation drive. Markets get the full treatment too: the AI mania's echo of 1999-2000, why he expects the rest of the world to outperform the US over the next 5-10 years (own US only for AI), a weaker dollar, gold and Bitcoin as anti-dollar plays, China's debt-and-demographics drag versus its technology edge, America's seven-company concentration, and why he would ban big-tech acquisitions. All figures, forecasts and views are the speakers' own, not verified by us. FULL COVERAGE: the captions appear to cover the entire episode. Sponsor: none stated. Nothing here is investment, legal or financial advice.

WTF is with Nikhil Kamath

Nikhil Kamath and his brother Nithin bring three veteran Indian venture investors together to explain how angel investing, venture capital and private equity differ, how funds are structured, how investors evaluate founders and what sectors may shape India’s next decade. The group also reflects on the previous cycle, the realities of exits and incentives, and how founders should choose problems to pursue.