Naval Ravikant is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList, a U.S. website for startups, angel investors, and job-seekers looking to work at startups.
Early life and education
Naval Ravikant was born in India. At the age of 9, Ravikant’s family relocated to New York where his single mother raised him. Ravikant is a native of New York, a place where he grew up for most of his upbringing. Ravikant lived in the Lower East Side in Manhattan.
He attended high school in Stuyvesant High School in New York City and graduated in 1991. After high school, he went to Dartmouth College, where he double majored and received his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and a Bachelor’s in Economic in 1995.
Epinions and Vast
In 1996, soon after graduating at Dartmouth College, Ravikant landed in Silicon Valley, where he started his short employment career working for a high-speed cable service provider known as @Home.
After spending a few years of his life working at his 9 to 5 jobs, Ravikant decided to do something exciting, something he can consider his own. For years, Ravikant worked as a programmer before becoming the co-founder and CEO of Epinions, a general consumer review site in 1999; and was later acquired by Dealtime, who rebranded the site to Shopping.com.
The acquisition was not an easy one. The process caused in a lawsuit instigated by Ravikant, targeting his co-founder along with the influential ventures Benchmark Capital and August Capital; alleging them of cheating him out of millions of dollars with the help of misrepresentations of material facts related to Epinions’ financial affairs, business operations, and false documentation. Eventually, in 2005, the lawsuit has resolved for an undisclosed sum, it caused too much damage to Ravikant’s reputation, earning him the nickname radioactive mud.
After the legal ordeal Ravikant had to go through, this gave him a deep understanding of the underlying mechanisms of fundraising, especially on the entrepreneurial side of things. Using his new-found knowledge, Ravikant combined forces with his buddy Babak Navi. They created Venture Hacks in 2007, a blog dedicated to helping other entrepreneurs raise capital. Venture Hacks is educating startups negotiation skills, how to pick a co-founder, how venture capital works, how to create relationships with lawyers and advisors, how to market their products, and many other vital business lessons crucial for a thriving start-up.
AngelList
With a list of 50 angel investors eager to finance $80 million, AngelList was co-founded by Ravikant and Navi in 2010! AngelList succeeded at what LinkedIn has not by creating a platform where people actually did business. However, before the platform could run smoothly as intended, there was a big barrier to be overcome first.
In late 2012, AngelList launched a portal for accelerators and incubators to accept and administer applications from startups to their programs. AngelList received applications for 500 Startups, AngelPad and TechStars Boston. Other accelerators, like Rock Health, only accept applications through AngelList.
In mid-2012, Kevin Laws and Naval Ravikant, AngelList’s chief operating officer, were committed in Washington in his support for the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act), a law that reduced many of the United States’ securities regulations with the objective of creating it easier for companies to either go public or to continue private longer while remaining to raise capital. Ravikant was in discussion with Senate and Congressional staffers, Steve Case, and influential Congressmen that would pay attention. During the same period, Ravikant planned an online petition that fascinated 5,000 signatures on a letter to Senate leaders in support of the Act. Later in 2013, Naval Ravikant wrote a letter to the SEC to oppose changes in the JOBS Act that he believed “could generate disastrous unintended outcomes for the startup community.”
In 2013, AngelList received from the SEC a no-action letter, permitting the procedures of its Syndicates platform. AngelList Syndicates was remarked as one of the most significant innovations in the venture capital and angel investment industries, getting momentum with quite a few renowned figures in the tech industry creating syndicates, including Scott Banister, Tim Ferriss, Jason Calacanis, Gil Penchina, Scott and Cyan Banister, Elad Gil, Fabrice Grinda and more. AngelList had 4,400 investors in 2017, working across 165 syndicates.
AngelList started Maiden Lane in March 2014, a first online venture fund for financing in syndicated deals. It was started with over $25 million in funding from a selection of investors.
AngelList revealed a contract in October 2015, with a third-largest Chinese private equity firm CSC (China Science & Merchants Investment Management Group) for establishing a new $400 million fund for early-stage startup investments. AngelList had raised $205 million from all sources prior to the deal, plus $43 million from institutional investors.
AngelList launched Republic in July 2016, a spinoff addressing the democratization of startup equity crowd-funding with non-accredited investors.
In November 2016, AngelList obtained Product Hunt for $20 million. Ravikant plans to build Product Hunt further in assisting companies to find their early customers.
In October 2017, CoinList spun off from AngelList, an initial coin offering services for startups and accredited investors. AngelList had profiles of over 70,000 startups at the end of 2017.
Created in 2010, the platform has a goal to democratize the investment procedure and to support startups with their challenges in fundraising and talent. It started off as an online introduction board for tech startups that wanted seed funding. Since 2015, the site lets startups to produce money from angel investors free of charge.