Naval Ravikant is an Indian American investor and entrepreneur. He is the chairman, co-founder and former CEO of AngelList, which has invested in a total of 290 companies over the past two decades and made only 127 exits. Ten of his early-stage invested companies are unicorns. These companies include Twitter, Uber, Poshmates, Foursquare, Wish.com, Poshmark, Thumbtack, Snaplogic, Notion, Opendoor and Stack Overflow.
Wiki/Biography
Naval Ravikant was born in 1974 (age 48 years; by 2022) in New Delhi, India. Ravikant’s early life was full of struggle as his father left the family and moved to the United States of America when he was 4 years old. His mother moved with him and his brother to New York five years later. They lived in Queens, New York. He studied hard to graduate from Stuyvesant High School, Manhattan in 1991 and went to Dartmouth College to earn degrees in economics and computer science. He once talked about attending Stuyvesant High School in an interview. He said,
It saved my life because once I had the Stuyvesant brand, I entered an Ivy League college that took me into tech. Stuyvesant is one of those intelligence lottery situations where you can break through with instant verification. You go from blue-collar to white-collar in one move.”
Physical Appearance
Height (approx.): 5′ 6″
Hair Color: black and brown
Eye Colour: dark brown
family and caste
Naval Ravikant belongs to a Hindu Family.
parents and siblings
Naval Ravikant’s father worked as a pharmacist in India and later worked in a hardware store in New York. His mother raised him and his younger brother Kamal. She worked alone for a long time at low wages.
wife and children
Naval Ravikant married Crystal Cho in 2013 who is a visual designer, and they have a son named Neo.
Naval Ravikant with his wife
livelihood
Step into the business world
Rawkant went to a law firm called Davis Polk & Wardwell for his internship and was fired three months later. In his own words about his experience at Davis Polk & Wardwell. He said,
They expected me to sit around a conference room with a newspaper—they wouldn’t allow me to read the newspaper—to sit there carefully in case someone needed a photocopy or binding or whatever. It is a matter of complete corporate legal discipline. After three months I was completely subordinate. I was coming in late and I wasn’t wearing proper clothes and I was reading message boards on Usenet, the old internet. It was definitely a bad fit for me.”
His first technical job was in the DMA, which was offered as part of the college’s work-study program. At DMA, he worked as a provider of computer support and database management for the company. Before moving to Silicon Valley, he also briefly worked at Boston Consulting Group. His first startup was Genoa Corp which he founded in 1998. This company was acquired by Finisar. In 1999, he co-founded his second venture, Appinions. The startup raised $45 million in venture capital from August Capital and Benchmark Capital. Appinions was originally a consumer product review site, which merged with the price comparison site Dealtime. The merged company, named Shopping.com, conducted an IPO in October 2004 and reached a valuation of $74 million.
Becoming a Venture Capitalist
He launched his second venture in 2007, known as Hit Forge, a $20 million early-stage venture capital fund. Hit Forge executed the masterstroke with its investments in startups including Uber, Twitter and Stack Overflow. That same year, he started with Venture Hacks, a blog that simplified the concept of venture capital funding and mentored startup founders. This blog got a good response, which started showing things in the VC domain. Later this blog changed to a platform named AngelList. AngelList is a fundraising platform for startups founded by Ravikant and Babak Nivi in 2010. After AngelList, he bought AngelList Ventures and AngelList Talent, which were separate platforms for investors and job seekers. Following the success of AngelList, he co-founded Metastable Capital which is a cryptocurrency funding company. The company reached an asset valuation of $69 million in 2017. After Metastable, he came up with Spearhead.co, an investment fund company that gave $1 million to 15 of its founders to independently invest in the technology startups of their choice. Spearhead now has a combined valuation of $86 billion.
A podcaster with a loyal following
After building a successful business from the very beginning, Ravikant came up with his own podcasts on Spearhead.co and Nav.al. In these podcasts, he discusses a variety of topics including investing, trading, philosophy and happiness. She has been praised as a podcast guest on shows such as Coffee with Scott Adams, The Joe Rogan Experience, The James Altucher Show, Village Global’s Venture Stories, Farnam Street and The Tim Ferris Show.
controversies
Ravikant and the other co-founders of Appinion were convinced that the company was worth less than US$45 million, which was raised from VC funding. This company was listed in IPO in 2004. After its first day in the IPO, the company was valued at $750 million. Ravikant and other co-founders filed suit against August and Benchmark Capital. He claimed that the founders were misled into believing that the company was worth much less than the amount raised in outside capital. This made him feel that his shares were worthless, which was the reason for his exit. The suit was settled in his favor in December 2005. However, it also ruined Ravikant’s reputation as suing your early investors is not considered a good way to exit the company. Ravikant was in the news for suing his investors and many statements were made about him. A media house said,
[Ravikant] It was better to win this suit, and he better hopes he makes enough for life, as he will never work as a VC again.
net worth
Naval Ravikant’s net worth was estimated at $60 million in 2020.
Facts / Trivia
- Ravikant is a software engineer who has done his graduation in computer science.
- In 2010, AngelList was launched as an email list for angel and seed-stage investors. This list was a part of the VentureHacks blog.
- During his graduation, he bought a Mac Classic for $3,000 with a Stafford loan for students, and it took him ten years to pay off that loan.
- As a child, he used to spend most of his time in libraries and roam around books till the closing time.
- He reads around 100 to 200 emails every morning.
