A Twitter search of his name reveals, in addition to his account with over 1.7 million followers and 0 followings, a legion of profiles that reproduce their quotes, add them, and discuss their silhouette.

We are talking about Naval Ravikant, one of the most important investors of recent years but whose figure has transcended the business world to become a kind of quasi-philosopher of the sphere of entrepreneurship.

“Make money with your brain, not with your time”, “Successful people are irrationally passionate about something”, and “You make your own luck if you persevere long enough.” All these inspiring phrases for many entrepreneurs and with a certain air marvelous for others came out of Naval Ravikant.

Born in New Delhi in 1974, Ravikant has one of those movie-like stories behind him. The American dream. He moved with his family to New York at the age of nine, where, although his father was a pharmacist in India, he could not practice his profession in the United States and ended up working in a hardware store.

It was a difficult transition for her family, which ended with the separation of her parents. Naval and his brother, Kamal Ravikant, were raised by their mother for most of their childhood during a time he described as extremely humble.

Today Ravikant has his investment fund, a fortune of 60 million dollars, and his tweets have been collected and disseminated by a third party in a book – The Naval Ravikant Almanac – referenced by New York Times and on Amazon’s entrepreneurship section bestseller list permanently.

According to the calculations of WSJ, your investments result in a gain of 0.1 cents for every Uber ride taken worldwide. With your signature, AngelList, your investment platform that functions as a kind of directory1,035 businesses were funded with an average contribution of $390,000 each.

Corn, how was your way there? How was he mythologized in such a specific circle?

Naval Ravikant: a story that seems to be taken from a film

From that humble childhood, Naval credits much of his professional career to attending the Stuyvesant Institute on a scholarship known to its alumni (including four Nobel laureates). He mentioned it in an interview with Scott Adams:

“It saved my life, because once I got the Stuyvesant brand, I got into an Ivy League college, which led me into technology. Stuyvesant is one of those intelligence lottery situations you can enter with instant validation.You go from blue-collar to white-collar in a single move.

Naval Ravikant

At Stuyvesant, he studied economics and computer science. After obtaining his baccalaureate, he worked for various companies. His last corporate job was at the Boston Consulting Group. Naval founded a consumer opinion portal, Epinions, in 1999, which he co-founded with his future partner, Nirav Tolia.

Epinions was one of the first websites to grow during the dotcom bubble.a forum for users to ask questions and post reviews that paved the way for today’s businesses like Tripadvisor, Yelp, or Quora.

Epinions ended somewhat oddly, with Ravikant, two other partners, and dozens of former employees suing co-founder Nirav Tolia, accusing him of being misled into believing that the company was worthless.

Hence, they divested their stakes and closed a merger with the DealTime company in 2003. The merged company was renamed Shopping.com and went public spectacularly, only to be acquired by eBay for over $600 million.

From AngelList to Oracle on Twitter

The lawsuit, settled in 2005 for an undisclosed sum, earned Naval some buzz as it paved the way for venture capitalists to be sued, a rare occurrence in Silicon Valley at the time.

But that was the start of what would later become his main activity.

“After the Epinions experience, a lot of people came to me for advice on all the moves in venture capital,” he once said. In response, Ravikant co-founded a blog called Venture, which has become something of an industry bible. Ravikant has also received calls from entrepreneurs asking how to meet investors, so AngelList began as a mailing list for a few dozen investors.

Today, AngelList has assets worth billions of dollars, connecting startups to investors. The platform makes money by exposing companies and taking a percentage of their capital in return.

But if Ravikant rose to fame for anything, it’s thanks to the tweets he’s been posting on the social network all this time., revered by many and compiled by others, as we said.

Others want to squeeze money-making, entrepreneurial success, and mentality out of him, in language that seems to have dazzled many under the umbrella of Naval’s resounding achievement, which, however, his messages may also be a clear case of survival bias.