Entrepreneur, angel investor and writer; co-founder of Epinions and AngelList.
1974–present · San Francisco, California
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Naval Ravikant was born on November 5, 1974 in Delhi, India, and moved to New York City as a child, around the age of nine, settling in Queens with his mother and his younger brother Kamal. His father had been a pharmacist in India, but the degree was not recognized in the United States and he worked in a hardware store instead; the family soon split up. In Ravikant's own account, he grew up in a single-parent household with his mother working, going to school and raising the two boys as latchkey kids. He has described the arrangement plainly: they were poor immigrants, there was a lot of hardship, and the children became self-sufficient very early. He also credits his mother with the one thing that made the hardship survivable, saying she gave unconditional and unfailing love, and with being the first person to notice what he was actually good at. The neighbourhood was not safe, so the public library became his after-school center; he would go straight there and stay until it closed. He had a paper route, washed dishes in a school cafeteria, and at fifteen worked out of the back of a van for an unlicensed catering company delivering Indian food. The turn came when he passed the entrance exam for Stuyvesant High School, the selective New York public school, which he has called the thing that saved his life because it gave an unknown kid from a struggling immigrant family a credential that opened the next door. He graduated from Stuyvesant in 1991 and from Dartmouth College in 1995 with degrees in computer science and economics, having interned along the way at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell.
In 1999 Ravikant co-founded Epinions, a consumer product review site, with Nirav Tolia, Ramanathan Guha, Mike Speiser and Dion Lim, backed by Benchmark Capital and August Capital. The company survived the dot-com crash and in 2003 was combined with DealTime to form Shopping.com. Several founders had already left and were given to understand their equity was worthless. Shopping.com went public on October 30, 2004 and closed its first day valued at roughly 750 million dollars; eBay agreed to buy it for 634 million dollars in June 2005. In January 2005 Ravikant and three co-founders sued Benchmark, August Capital and Tolia, alleging they had not been told material facts about Epinions' finances, including a Google deal expected to raise 2003 profits enormously. The case settled in December 2005. Suing his own venture backers made him, by his own description, radioactive mud in Silicon Valley for years. He served as a venture partner at August Capital from 2001, founded the classifieds marketplace Vast.com in 2003, and in 2007 started a small fund called The Hit Forge while launching the Venture Hacks blog with Babak Nivi to explain startup financing terms to founders. The blog's readership became the raw material for AngelList, which Ravikant and Nivi launched in April 2010 as a curated list of angel investors and quickly turned into online infrastructure for early-stage funding: syndicates, rolling funds, fund administration and startup recruiting. AngelList grew to encompass Product Hunt, CoinList and Wellfound, and Ravikant lobbied Congress in support of the JOBS Act, which loosened rules on private fundraising. His own angel portfolio, made largely before AngelList existed, included Twitter, Uber, Yammer, Stack Overflow, Postmates, Notion, OpenDoor, Wish and Thumbtack, and in February 2017 TechCrunch named him Angel Investor of the Year at the Crunchies. He co-founded the cryptocurrency hedge fund MetaStable Capital in 2014, spun CoinList out of AngelList in 2017 with Protocol Labs to run compliant token sales, and launched Spearhead the same year to bankroll founders as angel investors. He handed the AngelList chief executive role to Avlok Kohli in 2019 and stayed on as chairman. On May 31, 2018 he published a thread titled How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky), which compressed a decade of thinking into roughly forty short posts and became one of the most widely circulated pieces of writing in startup culture. Its argument runs from wealth as assets that earn while you sleep, through specific knowledge and accountability, to the four forms of leverage: labor, capital, code and media. He followed it with the Naval podcast in February 2019 and a stream of essays at nav.al, moving steadily from company building toward questions of happiness, desire, reading and attention. In 2020 Eric Jorgenson curated a decade of his tweets, essays and interview transcripts into The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, published with a foreword by Tim Ferriss and given away free online, with Ravikant taking no money from it. In 2023 he co-founded Airchat with the former Tinder product chief Brian Norgard, a social app in which posts and replies are voice recordings that the app transcribes; the team rebuilt it and relaunched publicly on iOS and Android in April 2024.
Ravikant's lasting contribution to founders is twofold: he rebuilt the plumbing of early-stage investing, and he wrote down a theory of how ordinary people accumulate wealth without a lottery ticket. AngelList moved angel investing from private dinners to an open marketplace and made syndicates and small funds practical, which widened who gets to write checks and who gets to raise them. The How to Get Rich thread and the Almanack that grew out of it turned a set of ideas into common vocabulary: specific knowledge, accountability, permissionless leverage, judgment, productize yourself, play long-term games with long-term people. Those terms now circulate far beyond Silicon Valley, quoted by people who have never heard of Epinions. He is also, by a wide margin, one of the most quote-farmed people on the internet, and that is part of the record. Hundreds of accounts recycle aphorisms under his name, many of them paraphrases, reorderings or lines that were never his; the Almanack's free full text and his own tweet archive exist in part as a check on that. His critics argue the philosophy flattens into slogans and that a body of aphorisms is easier to admire than to apply. What is not in dispute is the through line from a Queens library card to a public argument that wealth is created rather than transferred, and that the tools for creating it are now, for the first time, available without anyone's permission.
“Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep.”
“Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.”
“You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.”
“Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people.”
“Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you.”
“Escape competition through authenticity.”
“A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought - they must be earned.”
Their voice on summon.guide is grounded in:
Further reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ravikant
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