What I Got Right #4: I Actually (Learned to) Think From First Principles
Part of an ongoing series. Nine mistakes. Now what I got right.
First principles thinking is one of the most overused phrases in startup culture.
Everyone claims it. Founders cite it in pitch decks. Investors use it in feedback. Advisors recommend it. It has become one of those terms that signals a certain kind of intellectual seriousness without requiring any demonstration of the thing itself.
I want to talk about what it actually looks like in practice. Not as a philosophy but as a daily discipline that costs something, gets pushback, and occasionally makes you deeply unpopular with the people around you.
Because that is what it is. And if it is not costing you anything, you are probably not doing it.
A Conversation With My Daughter
A few days ago, my twelve-year-old came home and told me education is pointless.
She is in grade six. Her argument was clear and specific: she learns five times more at home, through her own reading and exploration and the things she chooses to pursue, than she does in a structured school environment. School, in her view, is a system optimised for compliance rather than learning.
Most parents would have dismissed this. Gently, maybe. With a reassuring explanation of why school matters, why credentials matter, why she should trust the process.
I did not dismiss her. Because her reasoning was sound.
We sat and discussed it properly. I did not tell her she was wrong. I did not tell her to stop questioning it. I pushed back on some of the specifics and agreed with others. We talked about what education is actually for, which is a more interesting question than whether the current system delivers it.
That conversation was first principles in the most personal context I have. The culturally correct response would have been to reassure her that school is important and that she should trust the system. The first principles response was to actually engage with what she said, evaluate it on its merits, and follow the reasoning wherever it went.
She is twelve. She is already thinking this way. That matters more to me than whether she arrives at the conclusion her school would prefer.
The Home Decision
I owned a home. I sold it. I have not bought again in India since.
This has generated more unsolicited advice than almost any other decision in my personal life. “Settle down.” “At your age.” “It’s time.” “What about security?” “What about the kids?”
The pressure to own a home in India is enormous and mostly unexamined. It is one of those decisions that gets made because it is what people do at a certain stage of life, not because anyone has actually thought through whether it is the right decision for their specific situation.
I thought through it.
My conclusion was different from the conventional one. The question I asked was not “should I own a home?” but “what do I actually want the next ten years of our family’s life to look like?”
The answer was: I want to be close to where my kids’ interests and education take them. Not anchored to a city or a location because that is where the property is. Not constrained in our choices because of a mortgage on a specific location. The freedom to move, to follow what matters, to not have a piece of real estate determine where we live.
That is a first principles answer. It is not the standard answer. It generated genuine worry from people who love me and wanted something different for us.
I was comfortable with that because the reasoning was sound. Not because I had found a framework that told me this was the right call, but because I had thought it through from the actual question rather than from the assumed answer.
The Enterprise to SMB Pivot
On the business side, the most consequential first principles decision I made was pivoting Hyperleap from enterprise to SMB.
This was not obvious. Enterprise is where the big contracts are. Enterprise is what most B2B SaaS companies chase. Enterprise is what the playbook says to go after if you are building software for businesses.
I went the other way. Not because someone else had validated the SMB path. Because I sat with a set of honest questions and followed where they led.
The questions were personal and uncomfortable. Can I hire a proper enterprise sales team? No. Can I operate comfortably in twelve-month sales cycles with multiple stakeholders and procurement processes? No. These are not failures. They are honest assessments of where my strengths are and where they are not.
But the deeper question was about the market itself. I kept asking: if enterprises can build AI capabilities themselves, and the largest companies in the world are all investing in that capability, why would they buy from a small startup with limited resources and no brand? The answer, honestly, was that the stronger ones would not. The enterprises most likely to buy from a company like Hyperleap were the ones who could not build themselves, which was a specific and shrinking segment as AI tooling improved.
SMBs were a different picture. They could not build. They needed solutions they could deploy without large technical teams. The sales cycles were shorter, the relationships more direct, the feedback loop faster. And there were far more of them.
That pivot came from primary research, customer conversations, and thinking carefully about where the market was actually going. Not from copying what another company had done. Not from a framework about market segmentation. From asking the actual questions and following the actual answers.
People around me had concerns. The comparison to companies that had succeeded in enterprise came up often. “Company X did it this way.” “The successful B2B players all went enterprise first.” I understood the parallels. I also understood that the parallel was not my situation, and that following someone else’s path in a different market at a different moment was not first principles. It was just imitation with extra steps.
Why This Is Genuinely Hard
First principles thinking sounds like freedom. In practice it is mostly friction.
Every time you reach a conclusion that diverges from the conventional one, you have to defend it. Not once but repeatedly, to different people, in different conversations, over months or years. The people pushing back are often smart and well-intentioned. They are drawing on real experience. Their parallels are not irrelevant.
But parallels are not analysis. “This is how it’s usually done” is not a reason. “Company X did it this way” is not an argument. These are starting points for thinking, not substitutes for it.
The discipline is to take the parallel seriously enough to understand it, then ask whether it actually applies to your situation. Sometimes it does. Often it does not. The situations that look similar on the surface are frequently different in the ways that matter most.
Over time, I have found that this gets less exhausting and more automatic. Not because the pushback stops, but because the reasoning becomes more confident. When you have followed first principles to good outcomes enough times, the process of trusting your own reasoning becomes easier. The external pressure does not disappear but it has less purchase.
The hard calls we make at Hyperleap now come from a combination of primary research, direct customer conversations, and something harder to name: judgment accumulated over eight years of watching what the market actually does versus what people predict it will do. Not from copying anyone. Not from pattern-matching to someone else’s success story. From thinking.
That is first principles at the operational level. It is not dramatic. It does not look like a eureka moment. It looks like doing the work of thinking clearly about the actual situation in front of you, every time, even when the easier path would be to just follow what someone else already figured out.
What It Requires
Intellectual honesty. You cannot do first principles thinking if you are not willing to follow the reasoning to uncomfortable places. The home decision was uncomfortable. The SMB pivot was uncomfortable. The conversation with my daughter about whether school is actually working is uncomfortable. Comfortable first principles is not first principles. It is just rationalising what you already wanted to do.
Tolerance for being misunderstood. The conventional path exists because it usually works for most people. When you diverge from it, the people around you will often interpret that as naivety, stubbornness, or risk. Some of that concern is genuine and worth listening to. But if you cannot tolerate being thought wrong by people you respect, you will drift back toward the conventional answer every time.
Patience with the process. First principles thinking is slow relative to just copying what works. You have to actually think, which takes time. The shortcut of following someone else’s playbook is faster in the short run. The cost shows up later, when the playbook does not fit and you have to start thinking from scratch anyway.
And perhaps most importantly: the willingness to be wrong and update. First principles does not mean certainty. It means honest reasoning. Sometimes the reasoning leads somewhere that turns out to be incorrect. The right response is to update, not to double down because you went through the effort of thinking it through.
The Throughline
The decisions I am most confident in, looking back, are the ones where I started from the actual question rather than the assumed answer.
Where do my kids need us to be? Not: where should we own property?
What kind of business can I actually build, given who I am? Not: what kind of business do successful B2B companies build?
What is my daughter actually saying, and is she right? Not: what should a twelve-year-old believe about school?
These are different questions. They lead to different answers. And the answers, even when they are unpopular, sit well because they came from honest reasoning rather than borrowed convention.
That is what first principles actually is. Not a framework. Not a badge. The discipline of asking the real question and following the real answer, even when it leads somewhere uncomfortable.
The bottom line: First principles thinking is not a philosophy. It is a daily practice that costs something. It means starting from honest questions rather than assumed answers, following reasoning even when it diverges from convention, and tolerating the discomfort of being misunderstood while you wait for the reasoning to prove itself. It gets easier over time. It never gets frictionless.
Where have you found it hardest to think from first principles rather than just following the conventional path? I’d genuinely like to hear.
I’m Gopi Krishna, founder of Hyperleap AI, where we build enterprise-grade conversational AI for small and medium sized businesses across the world. Subscribe to Second Order AI on Substack to follow along.