Naval Ravikant — Wikipedia

Source: raw/articles/naval-ravikant.md | Wikipedia, scraped 2026-04-25

Bibliographic Details

• Author: Wikipedia contributors
• Title: Naval Ravikant
• Publisher: Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
• URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ravikant

Summary

Naval Ravikant (born November 5, 1974, New Delhi) is an Indian-American entrepreneur, investor, and podcaster. He immigrated to Queens, New York at age 9 with his mother and brother Kamal Ravikant after his father emigrated separately; raised as a latchkey kid in an unsafe neighbourhood, he spent his after-school hours in the public library. He attended Stuyvesant High School and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1995 with degrees in Computer Science and Economics.

Career Arc

In 1999, Ravikant co-founded Epinions, a consumer product review site that raised $45 million in VC from Benchmark Capital and August Capital. Epinions merged with DealTime to become Shopping.com, which IPO’d in 2004. Ravikant and three co-founders sued Benchmark, August Capital, and a co-founder, alleging they were deceived into devaluing their common stock; the lawsuit settled in 2005 for an undisclosed sum — earning him the nickname “radioactive mud” in Silicon Valley.

Around 2007 Ravikant started The Hit Forge, a $20Mmicro-VCfund,investinginTwitter(2007),Uber(2010),andStackOverflow.Simultaneously,heco-wrotethe\ast \ast VentureHacks\ast \ast blogwith\ast \ast [[BabakNivi]]\ast \ast ,offeringentrepreneursadviceontermsheets.Theblogandinvestorlistsevolvedinto\ast \ast [[AngelList]]\ast \ast (co-foundedwithNivi,2010),aplatformconnectingstartupswithangelinvestorsandtalent.AngelListintroducedsyndicates(2013),receivedSECno-actionreliefforitsstructure,acquiredProductHunt(2016),raised$100M at a $4B valuation (2022), and launched AngelList India (2019). Ravikant lobbied for the 2012 JOBS Act, which legalised the AngelList syndicate model.

In 2014, Ravikant co-founded MetaStable Capital, an early crypto hedge fund, with long-term positions in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero; it returned >500% by early 2018 before being acquired by Dragonfly Capital in 2022. He co-founded CoinList (AngelList spinoff for compliant ICOs), became a board member of the ZCash Foundation, and launched Spearhead (2017) — a fund giving founders capital to make their first angel investments. In 2023 he co-founded Airchat, a voice-first social app, and in 2025 launched the stealth-mode Impossible Computer Company (AI focus, <20 person team).

Selected Notable Investments

Early bets include Twitter ($25Katseed),Uber($25K ~2010), Notion (2013 seed), Postmates (acquired by Uber for $2.65B),StackOverflow(acquiredbyProsusfor$1.8B), and Yammer (acquired by Microsoft for $1.2B).

Key Concepts Introduced

This source introduces Naval Ravikant as a biographical entity and is the primary factual reference for his life, career milestones, and investment track record. Secondary connections: angellist, coinlist, angel-investing, wealth-creation, blockchain, bitcoin, ethereum.