Naval Ravikant

Ravikant was born in Delhi, India, in 1974.⁠[1][2]

In 1985, at the age of 9, Ravikant moved from New Delhi to Queens, New York, where he was raised by his mother; she worked long hours for little pay, and the family moved frequently. He has described the family as poor and himself as very self-sufficient from an early age, often going to the library after school and staying until it closed.⁠[1][3][1][1][1]

In 1989, Ravikant was accepted to Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan. He credits the school with putting him on track to attend Dartmouth College.⁠[1][3][3]

Ravikant majored in economics and computer science at Dartmouth College and graduated in 1995. He chose the school for its high student satisfaction rating and an attractive financial aid package. While in college he interned at the New York law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and was fired after three months; after that he did not leave campus again until graduation, threw himself into computer science courses, and, through the work-study program, provided computer support and database management for the alumni magazine, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.⁠[3][1][3][3][3][3][3]

After college, he did a short stint at Boston Consulting Group before heading to Silicon Valley.⁠[3]

In 1999, Ravikant co-founded the product review site Epinions in Silicon Valley and served as its CEO.⁠[1][3]

In 2001, Ravikant was a venture partner at the venture capital firm August Capital.⁠[1]

In 2003, he founded Vast.com, a classified ad marketplace.⁠[1]

After merging with another company, Epinions went public as Shopping.com in 2004, finishing its first day at a value of $750 million, but Ravikant and three other co-founders saw none of the money. He, two other co-founders, and 39 former employees later filed a lawsuit alleging that, during the merger, another co-founder and the venture funders backing the company conspired to hide the company’s true value, leading them to agree to a devaluation of their common stock that left them holding worthless paper. The lawsuit was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

He said the day he realized that the company he had founded was going public while he got nothing “was horrific.” Suing venture investors was a risky move in an industry that depends heavily on personal reputation; afterward, rather than immediately starting another company, he raised money to become an angel investor.⁠[3][3][3]

In 2007, Ravikant founded Hit Forge, a small venture capital fund originally conceived as an incubator. The $20 million angel fund held stakes in Uber, Twitter, and Stack Overflow.⁠[1][4][4]

In April 2007, Ravikant and venture capitalist Babak Nivi began co-writing the blog Venture Hacks, explaining fundraising to entrepreneurs, including how to negotiate a term sheet, which terms can be problematic for entrepreneurs, and the pros and cons of convertible debt. Ravikant said he started the blog because he had not understood what he was getting into when he first raised money and signed term sheets at Epinions.⁠[5][5][3]

In 2010, Ravikant and Nivi began screening startups and recommending the best prospects to a mailing list of select investors, which they called AngelList; because it proved so popular, by the end of that year they decided to make it a full-time company. By October 2010, the list had nearly 400 investors, had helped 50 companies get funded, and had looked at over 1,000 deals.⁠[3][3][3][5]

Ravikant considered reshaping federal law essential to AngelList’s business and lobbied in Washington, D.C., to have the platform’s business model excepted from broker-dealer regulations; the change went into effect as part of the 2012 Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act.⁠[1][3][3]

In July 2013, AngelList began testing Syndicates, which let accredited investors on the platform create and lead a fund of angel money for a specific startup and collect carry. That November, Ravikant estimated that about $5 million had already moved through Syndicates; he said investing was now just a side hobby and that he was making all his investments through Syndicates.⁠[6][6][4][4]

In August 2013, Ravikant wrote to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission opposing the new Regulation D and Form D rules proposed as the JOBS Act was implemented. He argued that the rules were designed for Wall Street and that the penalty for non-compliance, a one-year ban on fundraising, amounted to a “death penalty” for a not-yet-profitable startup.⁠[7][7][7]

In September 2014, MetaStable Capital, founded by Ravikant together with Lucas Ryan, Josh Seims, and others, was launched. The San Francisco-based hedge fund invests only in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum and takes a long-term-focused value investing approach. In the spring of 2017, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Union Square Ventures, Founders Fund, and Bessemer Venture Partners invested in MetaStable; on June 23, 2017, the fund reported total assets of $69 million in a regulatory filing.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8][8][8]

In 2014, as CEO of AngelList, Ravikant hosted a group of institutional money managers in San Francisco to pitch them on seed investing through the platform. He said about $87 million worth of seed deals had been transacted via AngelList in the first year of Syndicates, and that AngelList had just launched a series of new funds, each designed to support syndicate investments in 100 startups. He said: “Like everything else, investing is going online.”⁠[9][9][9][9][9][9][9]

In October 2015, the Chinese private equity firm CSC Group committed $400 million to Upshot, a new $450 million fund that would both back existing syndicates and help activate new ones. At that point AngelList had helped facilitate $205 million in investment for 650 seed-stage companies. Ravikant said the money was expected to last four years and would allow AngelList to participate in these companies’ follow-on rounds, which syndicates usually cannot do because they are too small.⁠[10][10][10][10][10]

In December 2016, AngelList acquired the product discovery site Product Hunt; Product Hunt did not disclose the price, and a source close to the matter put it at about $20 million. Ravikant had previously invested in Product Hunt personally; he said AngelList already helped founders raise money and recruit, and with Product Hunt it could also help them launch products and find early adopter customers.⁠[11][11][11][11]

In 2018, Ravikant and Jeff Fagnan, a partner at Accomplice, founded Spearhead, which selects promising startup founders, provides each with $200,000 and potentially up to $1 million of investable capital, and sets up an independent fund for each, so that founders make angel investments on their own and earn carry in their own funds; AngelList provides legal and back-office services for these funds. The first cohort of 19 founders was selected from 1,500 applications. Ravikant said that, unlike the scout programs of venture firms, Spearhead aims to turn each founder into “a capitalist, and not a laborer.”⁠[12][13][13][13][12][13][13]

In mid-2019, Avlok Kohli became CEO of AngelList. Kohli said that before he stepped in, he and Ravikant had discussed splitting the business into separate companies.⁠[14][14]

In October 2019, Spearhead planned to raise roughly $100 million for its third fund, giving each of about 15 selected founders $1 million, five times the capital each founder previously received; Spearhead I and II were $25 million and $35 million vehicles, respectively. By then, 35 founders had completed the program, including Scale AI’s Alex Wang and Rippling’s Prasanna Sankar.⁠[15][15][15][15][15][15]

In 2020, Eric Jorgenson published The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness, a book on wealth and happiness built from transcripts, tweets, and talks that Ravikant had shared publicly, and made it available for free in PDF and e-reader versions; the book states that Ravikant earns no money from it.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In April 2024, AirChat, a voice-based social app founded by Ravikant and former Tinder product chief Brian Norgard, launched a new version on an invite-only basis; users communicate through voice notes, and each post is accompanied by an AI-generated transcript. A previous version of the app had been released in 2023. Within days of launch, the new version had been downloaded close to 50,000 times.⁠[16][16][16][16][17][16][17]

In 2026, Ravikant ranked 27th on Forbes’ list of America’s 250 most successful immigrants.⁠[2]

Early on, Ravikant made angel investments of $10,000 to $50,000 each, including in Twitter; he invested in Uber in 2010; and he was also an early investor in the delivery service Postmates. In his own biography he says he also seed invested in Notion and manages Ravikant Capital and the Spearhead fund of funds.⁠[3][1][2][18][18]

The first four Spearhead cohorts included 68 founders, whose companies include Near Protocol, Neuralink, Segment, Opendoor, PillPack, Rippling, Scale, and Vercel.⁠[12][12]

In his own biography, Ravikant says he also co-founded CoinList; as of 2023 he was chairman and former CEO of AngelList.⁠[18][18]

He publishes writing and the Naval Podcast on his personal website, nav.al, with Nivi as his regular co-host; as of October 2026, the most recent episode had been released in July 2026.⁠[19][19][19]

AngelList: Official website: https://www.angellist.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

Spearhead: Official website: https://spearhead.co/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]

Personal website: https://nav.al/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/naval (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh_dVD10YuSghle8g6yjePg (opens in a new window)⁠[19]