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Nandini Viadyanathan
Founder and Mentor, CARMa
She’s a traveling teacher who teaches entrepreneurship in several ivy -league business schools around the world. From being just a word in the dictionary five years ago, it has now consumed her whole being. Her moment of epiphany happened four years ago 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 500 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, at the bottom of the pyramid, to become opportunity enterprises creating surplus and generating enormous value. Startups has mentored over 6500 women in economies as plural as Afghanistan, countries in South and East Africa and India.
A year ago, she co-founded CARMa (Creating Access to Resources & Markets), (www.carmaconnect.in) with a lofty ambition: to change the karma of entrepreneurs in India. CARMa mentors startups, mature enterprises and family businesses. The mentoring encompasses getting organizations investment ready, creating business excellence and shortening the learning cycle 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. She is also the author of Entrepredia – A Step by Step guide to becoming an entrepreneur in India.
She lives in Bangalore (although she travels 300 days a year!) with her daughter, Medini and their dog, Mocha.
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