A Conversation With Rishi & Akshata Sunak
Long-Form Interview
Politics · Entrepreneurship · Identity · AI
Nikhil Kamath Podcast
What happens when a former Prime Minister, a celebrated entrepreneur, and a media personality sit down for a long, unscripted evening in Mumbai? You get one of the most wide-ranging, candid, and genuinely human conversations about leadership, legacy, love, and what comes next. This is that conversation — pulled from a sprawling, hours-long interview between Nikhil Kamath and Rishi and Akshata Sunak.
Nikhil Kamath
Co-founder of Zerodha and True Beacon, investor, and host. Also behind Foundry — a new residential entrepreneurship program being run out of Alibaug, near Mumbai.
Akshata Murty
Fashion entrepreneur, investor, and daughter of Infosys founder Narayana Murthy. Her career — built entirely on her own terms — spans fashion, venture, and cultural philanthropy.
Rishi Sunak
Former Prime Minister of the UK, ex-Goldman Sachs analyst, hedge fund investor, and the first British Asian Hindu to hold the office of PM. Still serving as an MP for North Yorkshire.
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Foundry: India's Answer to Y Combinator
Entrepreneurship
The conversation opened not with politics, but with an entrepreneurial project close to Nikhil's heart. He had just returned from Alibaug — a quiet coastal retreat about 30 minutes by boat from Mumbai — where the inaugural batch of Foundry was underway. Think of it as a residential college for entrepreneurship: a three-month, live-in program where 20 to 30 carefully selected founders build consumer businesses from scratch, together.
How Foundry Works
- Cohorts of 20–30 founders selected through an AI-based quiz and a 4-day boot camp, whittled down from thousands of applicants
- Each company receives approximately $500,000 in seed funding on a standard term sheet
- Participants live together in one house for 3 months, building their businesses in real time
- The program provides deep support in manufacturing, distribution, marketing, content, and packaging — dramatically shortening time to market
- Many participants team up as co-founders during the program itself
- At the end of 3 months, follow-on funding is opened to external investors
Why Consumer? Why Now?
Nikhil made a deliberate bet on consumer brands — an area where traditional VCs have been reluctant to play. The reasoning is straightforward: India's GDP is growing at 6–7%, but consumer spending is outpacing that at 12–13%. Younger Indians are saving less and spending more — and increasingly borrowing to do so. That structural shift, absent in the India either Nikhil or Rishi grew up in, creates a generational opportunity.
The Foundry cohort includes a candy company, a toothpaste brand, a jeans label, and a premium chocolate maker. Not SaaS. Not deep tech. Real, physical products for a fast-growing Indian middle class. And Nikhil is even turning it into a TV show — seven episodes — with the explicit ambition to "make heroes out of these entrepreneurs before their products hit the market."
The average cohort age turned out to be 28 — a mix of 18-year-olds who have never worked and late-30s professionals who walked away from stable careers. No plan. Just passion and selection.
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Storytelling as a Superpower
Communication · Leadership
One of the most memorable threads of the evening was sparked by a story about Nikhil's mother — Sudha Murty — at a crematorium. At a somber event, she pulled Nikhil aside to explain in vivid, ten-minute detail the mythology of the god presiding over crematoriums — his specific cosmic job description, his responsibilities, the logistics of managing souls in Haridwar. Classic Sudha Murty. Rishi, who married into the family, had seen this gift up close many times.
"Her ability to tell a story about anything, in any context, is a superpower. By far and away the most powerful way to communicate. And she somehow has in her head just stories for everything — for every age group, every topic, there'll be something."— Rishi Sunak
Rishi's Honest Admission
Rishi acknowledged — with characteristic self-awareness — that storytelling does not come naturally to him. He approaches things analytically, practically, and in a structured way. During the pandemic, that style worked brilliantly: the country wanted clarity and reassurance, not narrative flair, and Rishi delivered daily economic briefings to a captive audience. But once politics returned to normal — no more prime-time government press conferences with sympathetic, worried viewers — that analytical style became a liability.
"If you were able to communicate with storytelling, it would have served me better, actually."
Akshata's Natural Gift
Akshata, by contrast, sees the world in narratives. She is people-centric, intuitive, emotionally driven — and naturally constructs a beginning, middle, and end to whatever she's explaining. Rishi noted, with some admiration and gentle humor, that she is much more like her mother in this regard.
And Nikhil made a pointed observation: for a brown-skinned man to become Prime Minister of England — at 42 — you have to be good at storytelling. Rishi took it as a compliment, but also as a lesson he learned only gradually, perhaps too late in that particular chapter.
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The Inspiration Behind the Politician
Origins · Values · Family
When asked about his path from Goldman Sachs to Downing Street, Rishi didn't start with finance or ambition. He started with a bicycle and a pharmacy in Southampton.
His father was a family doctor. His mother ran a pharmacy. The two practices sat near each other and served many of the same patients over three decades. As a teenager, Rishi worked in the back of his mother's shop — making up prescriptions, doing the accounts and bookkeeping, learning the rhythm of a small business. In the evenings, he would deliver medicines by bike to patients who couldn't come in themselves.
"You'd go to the door and hand the thing over, and they'd say, 'Oh, are you Mrs. Sunak's son? Or Dr. Sunak's son?' And then they would proceed to tell me some lovely story about my mum and dad — something that either or both of them had done for them, or their parents, or their grandparents, or their kids."— Rishi Sunak
That experience repeated itself constantly — at the pharmacy, at the surgery, on weekend shopping trips. And through it, a young Rishi came to a profound realization: that it was possible for just two people, as individuals, to have a genuinely strong impact on their community. To touch so many lives in such a tangible way. That was his motivation for entering politics.
In the UK, parliamentary constituencies are small and intensely personal. Even as Prime Minister, MPs still hold "surgeries" — direct community meetings where constituents bring their problems. That retail, ground-level dimension of public service is something Rishi says he found deeply fulfilling — and something he has returned to with even more focus since leaving Downing Street, while remaining MP for North Yorkshire.
Rishi's parents still live in Southampton, where he was born. His father was a GP; his mother a pharmacist. He admits, with laughter, that he "disappointed them by not becoming a doctor" — though he adds: "It worked out okay."
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Education, AI, and the Skills That Will Actually Matter
AI · Education · The Future
The conversation took a sharp and wide-ranging turn into education and artificial intelligence — topics both Nikhil and Rishi have thought about deeply, though from very different vantage points.
The Indian Education Debate
Nikhil posed a sharp challenge: the Indian education system — rank-dependent, marks-obsessed — may be producing conformists in a world that no longer rewards conformity. Akshata, who studied in India until 18 before pursuing a liberal arts degree in the US, agreed that it can lock students into a narrow path. If you know what you want, it's great. If you don't, it can be stifling.
Rishi reflected on a moment at Stanford Business School where he and Akshata had disagreed about which courses to take. He gravitated toward finance, investing, and hard technical subjects. She pushed him toward organizational behavior, interpersonal dynamics, and people-centric thinking. He now admits she was right. Those "soft" skills — empathy, feedback, understanding human motivation — turned out to be far more valuable in leadership than any financial model.
Horizontal vs. Deep Skills
Rishi's framework for the AI era is nuanced. He doesn't advocate for generalism — he prefers the word breadth. The claim is not that deep expertise is obsolete; it's that deep expertise alone is no longer sufficient.
What he calls "horizontal skills" — critical reasoning, judgment, empathy, giving feedback, managing people, emotional regulation — are becoming more, not less, valuable as AI handles an increasing share of domain-specific knowledge tasks. The question to ask is: which parts of my job will AI be very good at, and which parts will it probably never replicate?
The answer, consistently, points toward human-centric skills: knowing what question to ask, evaluating the answer critically, motivating a team, navigating a conflict, making a judgment call in genuinely ambiguous situations. These are not automated away. They compound over time. And education systems — in India, the UK, the US — are all scrambling to catch up with this reality.
"Political leaders cannot afford to treat AI like tomorrow's problem. It is an action this day issue."
Critical Reasoning
The ability to evaluate AI outputs, ask the right questions, and push back with judgment — not just accept whatever the model returns. This is the primary "human edge" in an AI-augmented world.
People Intelligence
Understanding human motivation, giving meaningful feedback, resolving conflict, building trust — skills that cannot be reduced to a task list and that compound dramatically over a career.
Learnability
Perhaps the most underrated skill of all: the ability to keep learning new things across radically different domains. Rishi's own career — finance, investing, politics, technology policy — is itself an argument for this.
Compassion & Intuition
Akshata's argument: in an age of AI abundance, we should be leaning into being more human — not less. Compassion and intuition may be the defining competitive advantages that no model can replicate at scale.
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Rishi & Akshata: Different Starting Points, Same Destination
Partnership · Values · Marriage
Perhaps the most unexpectedly moving portion of the evening was when Nikhil asked the couple how they actually work — together, at home, in the big decisions. What emerged was a portrait of a genuinely complementary partnership: two people who almost never start from the same place, but almost always end up in the same one.
Rishi's Approach
Analytical. Structured. Process-oriented. Practical. He will map out the options, assess the risks, consider the sequencing. Even in this interview, Akshata teased him for giving her "the subtle evil eye" whenever she wandered off the question. He approaches decisions the way a fund manager might approach a portfolio — frameworks first, then judgment.
His instinct, as he admitted, is to read non-fiction — always for a purpose, always extracting an actionable takeaway. He now recognizes this as a blind spot: reading more fiction, he says, would have made him better at understanding people, humanity, and the why behind behavior.
Akshata's Approach
Intuitive. Passionate. Risk-taking. Heart-first. She is the one who, faced with 30 ice cream flavors, will deliberately pick the most bizarre option — partly on principle. (Rishi picked vanilla. She ended up eating his. He ended up eating hers. Nobody was entirely happy. Both survived.)
She comes at problems with what she describes as "the middle path" — a concept she encountered through Herman Hesse's Siddhartha during the pandemic, and which their 13-year-old daughter Anushka has apparently taken even further, unprompted, into Stoic and Epicurean philosophy. The balance between desire and restraint. Not moral high ground — just equilibrium.
"We know that the other person genuinely believes in the same things. Integrity. Working hard. Being curious about the world. Compassion. Respect for everybody. Those values — we share so many of them. Where they came from? Our parents."— Rishi Sunak
The shared values were visible, too, in the story of when their parents first met — Akshata's parents traveling from Bangalore to Rishi's family home in Southampton, accompanied by her uncle. Rishi describes it as "genuinely stressful" — two families superficially very different. And yet what his in-laws told him afterward was that they had been worried about whether the values would align. They did. Immediately.
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Akshata's Identity: Beyond Her Father, Beyond Her Husband
Identity · Validation · Purpose
Nikhil posed perhaps the most pointed question of the evening — not to Rishi, but directly to Akshata: "Forget Rishi and your dad. Where does Akshata's validation come from?"
He framed it with care. Being the daughter of one of the world's most celebrated entrepreneurs (Narayana Murthy of Infosys) and then the wife of a sitting Prime Minister places someone in an almost impossible position. People naturally assume luck, not achievement. The "rate of change" benchmark for happiness — the feeling of growing, of becoming — is extraordinarily hard to hit when you start from a position that others perceive as already arrived.
"I think people often look at the children of very accomplished people as being lucky. But I think the counter is true — I feel like they're some of the most unlucky people, because it's so much harder for them to actually feel a sense of accomplishment. A sense of self."— Nikhil Kamath
Akshata's answer was layered and genuinely thoughtful. She grew up watching her father not as a billionaire icon, but as a man "beavering away" at something he believed in — Infosys's motto was "Powered by intellect, driven by values" — and she found in that example not a burden, but an invitation. She pursued a liberal arts degree in California. She made her professional decisions independently. She created Vama, her own fashion brand, after business school. By the time Infosys became famous, she was already elsewhere, building her own thing.
Compassion
One of Akshata's three core values. Not as a sentiment, but as a practice — in how she raises her daughters, how she runs her philanthropic work, and how she engages with communities through programs like Lessons at 10.
Curiosity
A genuine love of learning — of history, storytelling, philosophy, the arts. This is the value she most directly inherited from her mother, and the one she most deliberately nurtures in her children. She is the reader. The explorer. The one who walks into a new country and wants to understand everything.
Personal Integrity
Defined not as virtue signaling, but as authenticity — being true to who she is, whether or not others understand or approve. She leans into her intuition. She defines her identity not by her accent, her address, or her relationships, but by the impact she creates and the values she upholds.
Her validation, she explained, comes from genuinely having impact. At 23, writing her Stanford application essay, she wrote about Mumbai monsoons — about how the same rain is beautiful from a house with a roof and terrifying without one. About equality of opportunity. About wanting to play some small role in creating a more equitable society. That idealism, tempered by two decades of experience, still drives her.
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From Goldman Sachs to Downing Street: Rishi's Journey
Career · Politics · Lessons Learned
Rishi's career path — Oxford, Stanford GSB, Goldman Sachs, hedge fund investing, Conservative MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Prime Minister — looks, in retrospect, like a straight line. It wasn't. But it was, in broad strokes, the journey he had imagined. Just faster than he expected.
Why Do Something Else First?
Rishi is emphatic on this point: politicians are more effective when they have done something meaningful before entering office. Not because politics rewards outside experience per se, but because people who have spent their entire lives inside the political system tend to see every problem through a political lens. They see the politics in every situation, rather than the situation itself.
Having built a career in finance and investment gave Rishi a different mental model — one grounded in long-term fundamentals, in ignoring short-term noise (a lesson borrowed directly from Warren Buffett), and in the discipline of separating signal from chatter. He found that same skill useful in Downing Street, where the daily media cycle can drown out the strategic.
Financial independence also mattered to him. Not as luxury, but as precondition: he wanted to enter politics without financial anxiety, able to make decisions based on duty rather than need. He wanted to give his family — and the partner he would meet — genuine flexibility.
Speed vs. Patience
The unexpected lesson of his career? Patience is its own competitive advantage.
In his 20s and early 30s, Rishi was like most ambitious young people: focused on the next milestone, anxious about windows closing, conscious of "30 under 30" lists and timelines. He wanted to get there fast. And he did — becoming the youngest Prime Minister in 200 years.
But looking back, he is more measured. There are moments, he argues, when arriving too early is worse than arriving too late. You reach the summit before you have the experience, the judgment, and the depth of character to be at your best once you're there. The speed of his ascent meant he was managing one of the most consequential jobs in the world — economic crisis, inflation at a 40-year high, post-pandemic reckoning — with less runway than he might have wished.
His conclusion, offered with characteristic lack of self-pity: "Patience is almost a bigger competitive advantage." He says it knowing it sounds strange from a man who became PM at 42. He means it anyway.
This framework — do something first, earn your footing, enter with purpose — is the advice Rishi gives young people considering public life. It is also, not coincidentally, the advice Nikhil's Foundry is implicitly built on: give aspiring entrepreneurs the support structure to build something real, so they enter the world of business with credibility, not just enthusiasm.
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Becoming Prime Minister: The Diwali Moment
Historic Milestone · Identity · Belonging
When Rishi became Prime Minister in October 2022, the circumstances were anything but ceremonial. He had just lost a bruising leadership election to Liz Truss weeks earlier. He was emotionally preparing for a different kind of next chapter — more time with his daughters, more space to breathe. Then, suddenly, in a matter of days, he was at Buckingham Palace being invited by King Charles to form a government.
It was Diwali. It was his youngest daughter's 10th birthday. It was his mother's 70th birthday. The family squeezed in one phone call. And then the machinery of government took over.
"The moment it first properly hit me was at the Downing Street Diwali reception, a few days after I became Prime Minister. People were expressing how much it meant to them — that I was the first British Asian, the first Hindu Prime Minister. And that was when it kind of did hit me, for a second."— Rishi Sunak
The meeting with King Charles was equally significant. As head of the Church of England, the King has always positioned himself as a defender of all faiths — not just one. And when Rishi arrived for the formal invitation to form a government, there were no scones. There were Diwali mithai. A quiet, unremarked gesture. Rishi found it deeply moving.
On Being "Too Indian"
Nikhil asked directly: was there a line where Rishi could have become too visibly Indian — taking the Gita oath, hosting Diwali parties at Downing Street, lighting diyas at the front door — that might have become politically problematic?
Rishi's answer was immediate and unequivocal: "It was non-negotiable." He made a commitment to himself before entering politics that he would not change who he was for the job. If that was going to be a problem, so be it. It never was — and he thinks that reflects well on the UK, a country that has come far enough that the story of the first Hindu PM was noted, honored, and then moved on from, without dominating everything else.
A Symbol, Not Just a Job
Rishi acknowledged — with visible sincerity — that being first brought extra responsibility. Not the burden of representation anxiety, but a genuine desire to do the job well also for the British Asian community that had invested hope in the moment. He wanted to make them proud. He wanted future generations of brown-skinned kids in the UK to see the office and think: that is possible for me.
Akshata added the perspective of arriving in India for the G20 — coming "home" while representing a different home. She described it as emotionally overwhelming: proud of her heritage, committed to the UK, living on what PM Modi once called the "living bridge" of the Indian diaspora — a bridge that belongs to both places equally, and exclusively to neither.
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Life Inside Number 10: The Reality Behind the Door
Behind the Scenes
Downing Street is smaller than people imagine. It's "higgledy-piggledy," in Rishi's words — offices and flats stacked together in a way that feels more like a rambling old manor than a seat of power. When you open the front door of the Prime Minister's flat, the Downing Street Policy Unit's breakout area is literally right there. Meetings happening. Staff typing. And occasionally, small children screaming on their way to school.
Continuity Over Ceremony
Because Rishi had been Chancellor before becoming PM, the family had already lived in Downing Street. When he moved up, they made a deliberate choice: don't change flats. Stay in the smaller Chancellor's residence, precisely to give their daughters stability and familiarity. The change of title was enormous. The change of address was zero.
The Girls' Experience
Their younger daughter, who loves history, eventually gave what Rishi describes as the best guided tour of Downing Street — curating the art, explaining the portraits, narrating the rooms. The security team spoiled both girls with sweets. The cafeteria lady made bacon sandwiches on their way to school. Nova the dog arrived as a puppy and was promptly adopted by several hundred staff members.
The Deliveroo Moment
Even in the highest office in the land, some things don't change. Rishi notes, with genuine amusement, that Uber Eats deliveries still showed up — at the back gate, of course, navigated through layers of security. The mundane insisting on itself, even in the extraordinary. A useful reminder that life goes on.
Smartest Person in the Room?
Nikhil asked which individuals stood out. Akshata bypassed famous names entirely — her answer was the young people who came to Downing Street for her "Lessons at 10" program. Children from across the country, often without great advantages, who arrived with such idealism that it moved her. That, she said, is the memory that will stay with her forever.
Rishi's answer focused on the AI pioneers — Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis — who came to speak with him very early in his premiership. That these individuals, building the most consequential technology in human history, took the time to brief a new Prime Minister on what was coming, struck him as both a privilege and a warning: this technology required political attention now, not eventually.
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Sovereign AI: A Framework for Nations
AI Policy · Geopolitics
The conversation moved into AI strategy at a national level — prompted partly by the recent AI Summit in India, which Rishi noted with satisfaction had grown from the original Bletchley Park summit he had initiated, and which had since traveled to South Korea, Paris, and now India. He found the energy at the Indian summit notably different from Western equivalents: optimism rather than anxiety, trust rather than fear.
On the question of sovereign AI — whether countries like India should build their own models rather than rely on American or Chinese capabilities — Rishi outlined a three-part framework:
What Sovereignty Actually Means
Rishi was careful to define the term. AI sovereignty doesn't mean building everything yourself — that's unrealistic for most nations. It means having reliable, trusted access to deploy AI technology according to your own values, laws, and priorities. For national security applications, that means air-gapped domestic compute with no external kill switch. For healthcare applications, data sovereignty and domestic hosting matter, but you might accept a foreign model if there's no lock-in. For commercial applications, cost and speed may dominate. The portfolio approach means making these distinctions deliberately, rather than defaulting to one provider for everything.
India's Structural Advantage
Rishi was genuinely enthusiastic about India's position. The Digital Public Infrastructure stack — Aadhaar, UPI, now Ayushman Bharat health accounts — gives India something almost no other country has: the plumbing to deploy AI applications to over a billion people simultaneously. The Sarvam announcement (an Indian-built language model) fits into this as a critical portfolio component. India has already established the principle of data localization for financial data; Rishi expects this to extend more broadly.
He praised Indian PM Modi's long-standing understanding of the technology stack — conversations he had with him going back to his own time in office — and noted that the energy and optimism among Indian entrepreneurs at the AI Summit was, for someone used to the more anxious Western debate, striking and genuinely exciting.
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Trade, Tariffs, and the New World Order
Geopolitics · Global Trade
Nikhil pressed on deglobalization — whether the world is fracturing into competing blocs, and whether a new US president would simply reset the clock. Rishi's view was measured but clear: some of the structural changes that feel like Trump-era disruption actually predate this administration, and will outlast it.
Why Tariffs Won't Disappear
The baseline tariff level in the US will likely be higher going forward, regardless of who is president. Partly because the revenue becomes addictive — very hard for any successor to give up. Partly because COVID permanently changed the supply chain calculus: "just-in-time" gave way to "just-in-case," and governments will not forget that lesson. And partly because national security concerns — exemplified by the Huawei telecoms decision that Rishi was involved in — now inform trade policy in ways that are structural, not cyclical.
Nikhil offered a counter-argument: in Birmingham's industrial heyday, protecting domestic industry enabled it to scale before opening up. Rishi acknowledged the infant industry argument has validity — but argued that between developed economies with similar rules, freer trade is generally better. The China case is different precisely because China did not play by the same rules, which forced a response from both the US and the EU.
Not the End of Cooperation
Despite the competitive framing, Rishi pushed back on the idea that the world has given up on mutually beneficial partnerships. He pointed to a wave of recent bilateral agreements: India-UK, India-EU, EU-Latin America, the UK joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The ASEAN countries are deepening economic cooperation. The Gulf is in active trade discussions. These are not the actions of a world that has abandoned cooperation — they are the actions of countries that have recalibrated their partnerships away from dependence on any single relationship.
His analogy: cricket used to have one World Cup. Now there are 20 different leagues — one dominant, many regional. Something like that is happening in global trade. Not deglobalization. Repolarization. And navigating that requires nations to be more deliberate about resilience and sovereignty than they were five years ago.
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Should Young People Get Into Politics? The Wilberforce Case
Leadership · Change · Public Service
Nikhil's most personal question of the evening: he wanted to convince more young Indians — entrepreneurial, ambitious, tech-minded — to enter politics. What would Rishi say to them?
The answer came in layers. First, the preconditions. Then, the misconceptions. Then, a history lesson that reframed everything.
1
Resilience
Politics in the age of social media is unforgiving. The day-to-day criticism is relentless, public, and sometimes deeply personal. You need thick skin — not by becoming callous, but by developing the discipline not to engage with every attack. You are human. You will be affected. The goal is to not be consumed.
2
Patience
Change takes longer than you think. Certainly longer than the private sector. The romantic notion that one speech, one protest, one disruption changes everything is a movie convention — not political reality. The Wilberforce case makes this viscerally clear: it took 20 years to abolish the slave trade. Another 20 to abolish slavery itself. The first meaningful vote took 10 tries. He never gave up.
3
Service Over Ambition
All politicians are motivated by both ambition and duty — Rishi is honest enough to admit this. The question is where you sit on that spectrum. If personal ambition dominates, people will sense it, and you will not have the impact you seek. The duty must be real. The service must be genuine. And crucially — it must be motivated by a specific, passionate mission.
"Change is less about a moment and more about a movement. Voice matters, but change comes about through participation — through becoming part of the institutions, changing from the inside through a period of time and hard work. That's how substantive change happens."— Rishi Sunak
The Wilberforce example was Rishi's most powerful illustration. William Wilberforce entered Parliament at 28 — as a backbencher, never a cabinet member, never Chancellor or PM. He chose that deliberately, believing it would give him the freedom, moral authority, and focus to pursue one mission: abolishing the slave trade. He was also strategically brilliant — when moral arguments failed, he made economic arguments and patriotic security arguments (Britain was at war with France; giving slaves to the French was a strategic liability). He built a movement. He had Thomas Clarkson painstakingly documenting the horror of what was happening. And he had patience. Twenty years of patience. Then another twenty.
For Rishi's audience — young Indian entrepreneurs with passionate, technology-driven missions — the message is this: you don't have to become Prime Minister to change 1.4 billion lives. Pass one clause. Change one law. Make India easier for entrepreneurs. Be the champion for small business in Parliament. That compounds. Forever.
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Losing It All: How Rishi Processed the Election Defeat
Failure · Resilience · What Comes Next
The final act of the interview turned to failure — specifically, to what it felt like to lose a general election as Prime Minister. Nikhil didn't sugarcoat the question. Rishi didn't sugarcoat the answer.
"It is hard because it is public. It comes at the end of a very grueling, intense campaign. And because it's public, you're failing in front of your friends and your family. And you have responsibility for the other members of your party — who, as a result of that loss, are no longer MPs. Their livelihoods, their purpose, is gone."— Rishi Sunak
What Held Him Together
Rishi's anchor through the defeat was returning to why he took the job in the first place. When he became Prime Minister, he entered a situation that, by any rational calculation, he should have refused: inflation at a 40-year high, his party 36 points behind in the polls, a leadership crisis that had just consumed his predecessor in weeks. He took it anyway — not out of ambition, but out of a genuine sense of duty. He was, at that moment, the person best placed to stabilize the country in an exceptionally difficult time. He made a decision knowing it would probably end in electoral defeat. It did.
That clarity — I did this because it was my dharma, my duty, not because I expected to win — gave him the foundation to process the loss without being consumed by it. He references the Gita: focus on the duty, not the fruits. Do the job to the best of your ability. What follows is not the measure of your worth.
Curiosity About Failure
Akshata introduced the phrase that stayed with the room: be curious about your failures. Don't explain them away. Don't become a victim of them. Don't pretend they didn't sting. But look at them with the same interest you'd bring to anything else — what actually happened, why, what you misjudged, what you can change, and what you'd do differently.
She applies the same thinking to their daughters. She tells them: the person you have to be kindest to first is yourself. Because unless you understand internally what that means — unless you can practice self-compassion — you cannot lead with it in the world. Almost by definition, the decisions that reach a leader's desk are 50/50 decisions. If they were obvious, someone else would have made them already. You will not get them all right. You were never supposed to.
Rishi added the insight a senior tech executive shared with him in Downing Street: you're in this position because your judgment is, on average, better than most — trust that, and when things go wrong, reflect honestly and move forward.
"It's Liberating"
Both Rishi and Akshata describe the post-Downing Street period as unexpectedly exciting. A blank canvas. No fixed milestone to chase. No track to run on. For someone who has spent 20 years on a very defined path, this is disorienting — and then, slowly, freeing.
More India
Rishi has been back to India almost every few months. The family took the girls to see the Taj Mahal. He attended the IPL final with Nikhil's father. Akshata was at the Jaipur Literary Festival. More of this, more often, is clearly the plan.
Still in Parliament
Rishi remains MP for North Yorkshire — his anchor and source of weekly fulfillment. He is enjoying it differently now: asking questions rather than being at the dispatch box answering them. The retail, community-level aspect of the job — the surgeries, the constituents, the local problems — remains deeply satisfying.
The Next Chapter
Neither Rishi nor Akshata knows exactly what comes next. They are 45. They have, God willing, more working years ahead than behind them. They are refusing to define the next chapter before it begins. The ability to adapt, to learn, to grow — that, Rishi says, is the compounding skill that has served him across finance, politics, and technology, and will serve him wherever the canvas leads.
Sourced from Nikhil Kamath's Podcast | People by WTF | Rishi Sunak & Akshata Murty: Power, Identity & Why Patience Beats Ambition | https://youtu.be/spdUv7OFOu4?si=nSjrmH898IEx1AJM
Poets vs. Politicians — and the Middle Path
Final Reflection
Nikhil closed the evening with a provocation: "Civilizations perish because they listened to their politicians more than they listened to their poets."
Akshata went first. She would once have said: poets. Idealists, emotionally driven, moved by words, committed to truth rather than tactics. That is the world she came from — Stanford Business School classified students as "poets" and "quants," and she was firmly in the poets' column. Rishi, with equal firmness, was in the quants'.
"I'm not saying today I won't say poets. The answer is more nuanced today. There are people like Rishi who can do this with a great deal of integrity, and who can bring about impact at scale. And those people are needed in the political world. So today I would say — both."— Akshata Murty
Rishi's reflection was perhaps more surprising. He acknowledged that he has moved, over time, in the other direction — toward poetry, toward fiction, toward the understanding of people and purpose that non-fiction read purely for actionable takeaways never quite delivers. He wishes he had read more novels. Not for the plot, but for the why — for humanity, for emotion, for the stories that explain what makes people do what they do.
What They Learned From Each Other
Akshata, over 20 years, learned from Rishi that idealism without a vehicle is just sentiment. That the political process — unglamorous, slow, frustrating as it is — remains the most powerful mechanism for change at scale. That you cannot save the world from the outside.
Rishi learned from Akshata that the analytical, action-oriented approach to life misses something essential: the why. The people. The stories. The emotional texture of human experience that no framework fully captures. He is still learning. He says so.
The Marriage That Makes the Case
Nikhil's final aside: "You both make a really good case for marriage." They laughed. Akshata threatened to use it as a ringtone. But beneath the laughter was something genuine — a portrait of a partnership that works precisely because it is unresolved. Two people who disagree on starting points and agree on destinations. Who trust the process because they trust each other. Yin and yang. Analyst and poet. Vanilla and Sichuan peppercorn ice cream.
The conversation wound down over Subko chocolates from Kerala, discussions about Karnataka cacao, plans for Foundry guest lectures in Alibaug, and promises to do this again — properly, in Bangalore, next time they're both in the country. It felt, appropriately, like the beginning of something. Not the end.
On Curiosity
"Being curious about your failures. It's the story you tell yourself about why things didn't work that matters most. Not victim-centered. Honest. Reflective. Then you can grow."
On Identity
"I am a Bangalore girl with a British accent. My identity comes from genuinely having impact — staying true to my values, honoring my heritage, giving to the communities in which I live."
On What Comes Next
"We have a blank canvas. But I would like to think we have wisdom with it. We are lucky — we can do things that interest us, that fuel our passions. That's the high, if there is one."
Sourced from Nikhil Kamath's Podcast | People by WTF | Rishi Sunak & Akshata Murty: Power, Identity & Why Patience Beats Ambition | https://youtu.be/spdUv7OFOu4?si=nSjrmH898IEx1AJM
Thank You
I’m Raghavv—a Data and AI native Commercial Operations leader with 12+ years of global experience across the US, Europe, and India.
I write at the intersection of AI, economics, and the future of knowledge work—breaking down how technology is reshaping professional leverage, uncovering hidden dynamics like Digital Rent (a term I coined), and sharing practical frameworks to help you stay relevant—and ahead—in an AI-native world.
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Sourced from Nikhil Kamath's Podcast | People by WTF | Rishi Sunak & Akshata Murty: Power, Identity & Why Patience Beats Ambition | https://youtu.be/spdUv7OFOu4?si=nSjrmH898IEx1AJM