A consultant shares how to pass case interviews using first principles thinking and land a job at top consulting firms like McKinsey and BCG

• Eugene Hayden has worked at Google, KPMG, and Boston Consulting Group.
• He takes an actual case study from a recent interview and solves it by using first principles thinking.
• The Big 3 companies want to see how deeply you can understand a problem without using existing frameworks.

Let’s talk about first principles thinking. It has been used by brilliant minds like Aristotle, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla, and it is reported to be Elon Musk’s and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ favorite way to solve problems.

How does it work? The idea is to break down complicated problems into basic elements and then reassemble them from the ground up. Boiling things down to their fundamental basics requires fundamental understanding of the problem.