Rahul Narvekar Founder CEO of The India Network and Founder Director of Scale Ventures – an early stage investment fund, Rahul is an entrepreneur who started his career at an early age, as a door to door salesman to support his education.
After being expelled from his entrepreneurship programme for asking “too many questions” and “being a trouble maker” his maiden venture in cable advertising was in 1994. In 1999, he setup Asia’s first interactive music channel – Channel Oxygen in Bombay. It was love for C. Pallavi Rao that made him move to Delhi where he started from scratch in a completely new field of work: Mall Management. He rose from the level of a Senior Manager to becoming the VP of Ansal Plaza, the first mall of India.
Moving with and ahead of times being his forte, in 2009 he set up Fashion and You which was one of the earliest e-commerce fashion portals and raised more than $ 58 million for the same. In 2013 he partnered with NDTV to set up Indian Roots for selling Designer and Ethnic wear to the Global Indian diaspora. Exiting this in 2016 he set up Scale Ventures group – an early stage angel fund as also The India Network, an on ground community for start-ups focused on Tier 2, 3, 4 and beyond cities of India and students. His passion and intent to create value for start-ups and entrepreneurs from the smaller towns of India, led him to take a cohort of 15 promising start-up founders and some young student entrepreneurs to the United States for an intensive boot camp and pitch their ideas to investors from Silicon Valley in September 2017, helping 5 start-ups raise funds and with others getting mentored.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
When business started difficulties overcame:
“the first thing I had to overcome was the fact that I was attempting to get into business. So, everyone around me told me boss get a job because you come from a poor family, you need to support your parents and this is very risky. The common word was its too risky, it’s too risky and it’s not for you. Because in the nineties there was no funding available as such. The word venture funding, seed funding all of them didn’t exist. The only way to get money was to go to a bank, give them collateral which used to be an immovable property, I didn’t have any collateral. So, all I kept hearing was you should not get into this”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- The Godfather by Mario Puzo
- King Rat: The Fourth Novel of the Asian Saga Book by James Clavell
- Tai-Pan: The Second Novel of the Asian Saga Book by James Clavell
- Noble House: The Fifth Novel of the Asian Saga Book by James Clavell
- Shogun: The First Novel of the Asian saga by James Clavell
Favourite Quote:
- “if what you wish for comes true it’s good but if what you wish for does not come true it’s even better”
- “you should learn to celebrate your failures also”
Recommended Online Resources:
Mind Valley Professor Rao Developing Extreme Resilience
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“be shameless. The day you stop giving an F about what anybody else thinks about you you will start doing more stuff, you will start taking more chances. And a lot of times it’s just that if you do it more number of times will get good at it and you will get better at it and you will have a better shot… Just keep doing, doing, doing. So, keep hustling ”…[Listen for More]
More About Rahul Narvekar:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“I think goals should never be easy, they should force you to work, even if they are uncomfortable at the time.” Michael Phelps
Other Quotes From the Chat with Rahul Narvekar:
- “hire better, spend more time on hiring because typically what happens in a start-up is you will think that the hiring is not the CEOs job or the founder’s job and you will outsource it to HR”
- “businesses live and die by cash flow. So as the founder CEO you should monitor cash flow especially at a time like this which nobody anticipated. So have a Hawks eye on your cash flow”
- “look after your health because of the energy required to drive a start-up… So, build stamina for the long-term”
- “be shameless. The day you become shameless, the day you stop giving an F about what anybody else thinks about you, you will become successful in no matter what you do… Biggest fear you will get shamed, you will get labelled because of failure, it’s your family, your friends, your peers, everybody. And that fear has made so many people not do something that they would absolutely loved that. So, it makes a lot of people take what I called the safe spot. But the day you become shameless you are okay with rejection… So, if you are shameless you will do a lot of things, you will take up a lot more risk”
- “to very large extent success is also doing things which no one else is doing and keep doing it, keep doing it. And at some point, it cracks”
- “the key skill is managing people”
- “always maintain your balance and not react to external circumstances, stimuli, whatever. And especially in a time like this I think very, very relevant”
Leave a Reply