Nandini Vaidyanathan
Nandini is a traveling teacher who teaches entrepreneurship in several ivy-league business schools around the world including Princeton, London School of Economics and National University of Singapore, overseas and in India in IIM–A, IIM–B, IIM–L and ISB. From being just a word in the dictionary six years ago, it has now consumed her whole being.Her moment of epiphany happened in 2006 when she realized that in India not too many people became entrepreneurs simply because they didn’t know how. So she founded her company Startups to mentor entrepreneurs (forstartups.blogspot.com).Up until July this year, she has mentored over 600 startup entrepreneurs across domains, across geographies, pro bono. Twenty years in the corporate sector, in MNC’s on all inhabited continents, have given her enough reason to say, been there, done that.
Startups has also been involved in mentoring women to scale from livelihood enterprises to opportunity based and profitable organizations in Afghanistan, countries in South and East Africa and India.
In July 2010, she founded CARMa (Creating Access to Resources & Markets), (www.carmaconnect.in) with a lofty ambition: to change the karma of entrepreneurs in India. She writes a regular monthly column for the magazine, Entrepreneur. It delights her no end that it is from smaller towns that aspiring and practicing entrepreneurs reach out to her after reading it.
She is a TED speaker.
Her best-selling book Entrepedia – a Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming an Entrepreneur in India, has touched the lives of many a start-up entrepreneur in India as evidenced by the no of mails she receives every month. She cherishes them all but her favourite is from a 77-year old retired business man, who wrote to her saying ‘I’m angry with you that you didn’t write this book 40 years ago when I started my business.
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