Naval Ravikant is an Indian-American entrepreneur, angel investor and author. He is the chairperson, co-founder & former CEO of AngelList-a start-up.
He has invested in more than 200 companies at their early stage, few of them are Uber, Twitter, Wish.com, Poshmark, FourSquare, Notion, SnapLogic, OpenDoor, OpenDNS, Yammer & Clearview AI, with over 70 total exits and more than 10 Unicorn companies.
He is a Fellow of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship. He is a podcaster also, who shares advice on pursuing wealth and happiness.
Early life & Education:
Naval was born in 1974 in India. At the age of nine, he shifted to New York with his mother & brother- Karmal. In 1991, he completed from Stuyvesant High School.
In 1995, he completed his graduation with degrees in Computer Science & Economics from Dartmouth College.
He interned at law firm named Davis Polk & Wardwell in college. After graduation, he had a brief stint at Boston Consulting Group before heading to Silicon Valley. In 2013, Naval Ravikant married Krystle Cho.
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He loves to discuss business & philosophy. He tries to connect with common people by a podcast. He tries to share his knowledge & experiences through books.
Entrepreneurial Journey of Naval Ravikant:
Epinions:
Naval co-founded consumer product review site Epinions in 1999. They raised $45 million in venture from Benchmark Capital and August Capital.
Epinions merged with comparison pricing site Dealtime with the approval of Ravikant and the other co-founders that had left the company in 2003.
Even though, it meant valuing their shares at zero. After merging, the company was known as Shopping.com.
It held an IPO in October 2004. It was worth $750 million after its first day of trading. Ravikant and three of his co-founders filed a lawsuit against Benchmark, August Capital in January 2005.
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Their co-founder from Epinions claimed that to get their approval for the merger—they were misled to believe that at the time of the merger.
The company was worth “$23 million to $38 million”, less than the $45 million that they had raised in outside capital, making their shares worthless. The suit was settled in December 2005.
Hit Forge:
Naval started a $20 million venture named “The Hit Forge during 2007. The company invested in prominent start-ups including Twitter, Uber and Stack Overflow.
AngelList:
He began co-writing a blog called Venture Hacks, which “offered detailed advice on negotiating term sheets, explained which sections mattered, and which provisions were bogus” in 2007.
It progressed into AngelList. In 2010, Ravikant co-founded it as a fundraising platform for start-ups to raise money from angel investors. The start-up also operates Product Hunt.
MetaStable Capital:
Ravikant co-founded MetaStable Capital, a crypto currency hedge fund in 2014. It owned Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero and a number of other crypto currencies.
As of June 2017, its assets were around $69 million. Investors in the fund include Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Spearhead.co investment fund:
Ravikant launched Spearhead, an investment fund that raised $100m for its third fund to provide founders with $1m each to invest in technology companies as angel investors in 2017.
The first two classes of the company include founders from 35 firms. Together, these firms are worth over $10B, and four of them are unicorns. The firms include Neuralink, Opendoor, PillPack, Shippo (company), Rippling and Scale.
Nav.al, Spearhead, and other podcasts:
Ravikant runs a short-form podcast at Nav.al and Spearhead.co. There discusses business, philosophy and investing.
He worked as a podcast guest for The Joe Rogan Experience, Coffee with Scott Adams, The James Altucher Show and Farnam Street among others.
With Naval’s permission, Eric Jorgeson curated his tweets, essays, and interviews on wealth and happiness.
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He published it as a book called ‘The Almanack of Naval Ravikant’. Tim Ferriss wrote the foreword for that book. Ravikant did not make money from it. It can be downloaded online free.
Naval is a pride for Indians & Americans. He became a successful investor & entrepreneur by himself.
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He created millions of assets due to his enormous bank of knowledge in the field of investment. Truly, he is an inspiration for entrepreneurs & investors.