Fireside Ventures' Kanwal Singh on the consumer-brands bet nobody believed in, why "for a 5x, nobody will call you legendary," and on refusing the one-100x-outlier game

1 · Summary

Part 1 of 2. Kanwal Singh is the first venture capitalist to appear on First Principles, and the reason is the bet he made with the fund itself. In 2017, at the peak of the tech boom, he walked away from tech investing to raise a fund only for Indian consumer brands, when almost nobody believed India had a consumer story worth venture capital. His first backers weren't institutions, they were the consumer families who had built India's brands. This half covers the whole bet: what investors actually said when he pitched a consumer-only fund, why he raised in India rather than abroad, the ownership and follow-on design he corrected fund after fund, his claim that most of his companies succeed rather than one outlier, and his working map of India 1, 2 and 3. Part 2 turns to the person behind it.

2 · Chapters

0:00 Cold open and Part 1 intro

3:27 What Fireside is, and why it exists

10:04 How the fund makes money

11:23 The stats: 9 years, 4 funds, 68 investments

12:50 Raising fund one: consumer families, not global institutions

17:14 Two years as a solo angel

25:51 Ownership by design, and the follow-on model

34:05 What "success" means, and the anti-power-law

36:56 The centre of excellence