How did Naval Ravikant make his first million?
Naval Ravikant likely made his first million when Shopping.com went public, and Naval won the lawsuit against his friends. Here is his story:
Naval Ravikant was born in New Delhi, India, in 1974 but moved to New York City when he was just nine years old.
He attended Dartmouth for studies but didn’t get into entrepreneurship directly. He started his career with a consulting firm, BCG.
Naval left BCG to then work for a high speed cable provider, @Home. The company merged with Excite, and the combined valuation of the company was seven billion dollars. This was at the time of the internet boom. Naval walked away from a big amount of unvested @Home stock and joined August Capital. In hindsight, it was a great decision for Naval, as the company eventually filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Naval then formed a team and raised a seed round of eight million dollars for his company, Epinions, where anyone could provide reviews for anything (cars, computers, etc.). Naval grew the company very fast, and in one year, the company was valued at twenty five million dollars after Series A.
Even though the company grew so fast, after the dot com bubble burst, with no hope of an IPO for the company, Naval left the company.
Epinions merged with Dealtime in 2003 to form Shopping.com. Shopping.com went public in 2004 and was valued at $750 million.
Although Naval approved the merger with Dealtime, he found out that his stock was worth nothing, so he ended up getting into a lawsuit against the other founders and got the share he deserved. Naval likely made his first million at this time
Image Attribution:Edmund Hillary Fellowship, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
