Who is Naval Ravikant…??
NAVAL RAVIKANT is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList. Scroll down to read more…!
He previously co-founded Vast.com and Epinions.com, which went public as part of Shopping.com. An active angel investor and has invested in more than 100 companies, including many “unicorn” mega-successes. His deals include Twitter, Uber, Yammer, Postmates, Wish, Thumbtack, and OpenDNS. In recent years, he is the person I call most for startup-related advice.
EARLY LIFE
Naval was raised poor in an immigrant family. Here’s what he says about,“We came to this(USA) country (from India) when I was 9 and my brother was 11. We had very little. My mother raised us as a single mom in a studio apartment. She worked a menial job by day and then she went to school at night, so we were latchkey kids. . . . A lot of growing up was watching the ideal American lifestyle, but from the other side of the windowpane, with my nose pressed against the glass, saying, ‘I want that, too. I want that for myself and my kids.’ I grew up with a very dark view of the world on the other side of the tracks. . . .”
Naval’s name roughly means “new man” in Sanskrit. His son is named Neo, which means “new” in Greek, is an anagram for “one” , and, of course, is well featured in The Matrix.
He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1991.In 1995, he graduated with degrees in Computer Science and Economics from Dartmouth College.In college, he interned at international law firm Davis Pold & Wardwell. After graduating from Dartmouth College.
Career
In 1999, Ravikant co-founded consumer product review site Epinions. They raised $45 million in venture capital from Benchmart Capital and August Capital. In 2003, Epinions merged with comparison pricing site Dealtime with the approval of Ravikant and the other co-founders that had left the company — even though it meant valuing their shares at zero.
The merged company became Shopping.com which held an IPO in October 2004. After its first day of trading, it was worth $750 million.
Around 2007, Ravikant started a $20 million early stage venture capital fund named “The Hit Forge”. Hit Forge invested in prominent startups including TWITTER, UBER and Stack Overflow.
In 2007, Ravikant 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.”
That blog evolved into AngelList, which Ravikant co-founded in 2010, as a fundraising platform for Startups to raise money from angel investors.
In 2014, Ravikant co-founded MetaStable Capital, a Cryptocurrency Hedge fund that owned Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero and a number of other cryptocurrencies. A June 2017 regulatory filing reported its assets as $69 million.
In 2017, Naval launched Spearhead, an investment fund which raised $100m for its third fund to provide founders with $1m each to invest in technology companies as angel investors. The first two classes of Spearhead include founders from 35 companies. Together, these companies are worth over $10B, and four of them are unicorns. The companies include Neuralink, Opendoor, PillPack,Shippo(company), Rippling and Scale.
Naval runs a short-form podcast at Nav.al and Spearhead.co where he discusses philosophy, business, and investing.
NAVAL’S LAWS
Be present above all else.
Desire is suffering (Buddha).
Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else (Buddhist saying).
If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.
Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded foranything else. All the real benefits in life come from compound interest. Earn with your mind, not your time. 99% of all effort is wasted. Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive.
Praise specifically, criticize generally (Warren Buffett).
Truth is that which has predictive power.
Watch every thought. (Always ask, “Why am I having this thought?”)
All greatness comes from suffering.
Love is given, not received.
Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts (Eckhart Tolle).
Mathematics is the language of nature.
Every moment has to be complete in and of itself. & so on…………….
90% FEAR, 10% DESIRE
“I find that 90% of thoughts that I have are fear-based. The other 10% are probably desire-based. There’s a great definition I read that says, ‘Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts,’ which means that enlightenment isn’t this thing you achieve after 30 years sitting in a corner on a mountaintop. It’s something you can achieve moment to moment, and you can be a certain percentage enlightened every single day.”
SUCCESSFUL AND HAPPY — DIFFERENTCOHORTS?
“If you want to be successful, surround yourself with people who are more successful than you are, but if you want to be happy, surround yourself with people who are less successful than you are.”
