The Start-Up Specialist: Nandini Vaidyanathan

June 23, 2014: Nandini Vaidyanathan calls herself a travelling teacher. The owner and founder of a company called CARMa (Creating Access to Resources and Markets), Vaidyanathan is someone who learns on the go, as she does and advise businesses. This start-up specialist is a an entrepreneurship guru and believes in exploring new ideas and scaling them up. But at the core of it all, she believes entrepreneurs deserve a fostering ecosystem.

Vaidyanathan - who also teaches Entrepreneurship in various Ivy League business schools around the world that include London School of Economics, Princeton and National University of Singapore, IIM-Ahmedabad - didn't think her career and life would be surrounded by new businesses, the start up fever or writing books on the subject. As a child she was an introvert and a bookworm. After finishing up her post-graduation from Delhi School of Economics, she went on to study at the London School of Economics. She then started working and went on to work in different countries before she finally came back to India in 2006.

She  wrote a book called ‘Entrepedia’ that went on to become a best-seller. But of course there is no fixed recipe for entrepreneurship and so it differs from country to country and culture to culture. Talking about India, she regrets the lack of market intelligence put the business plan. “We bring the product to market and when customer doesn’t buy it we do market research and it becomes like a postmortem,” she said in an interview to Twenty19. Her company mentors people who are as young as twenty-five and wish to build a business around an idea.

When asked about the ideal recipe to success for entrepreneurs, Vaidyanathan said in an interview with Social Story, "create an eco system, a habitat to nourish the spirit of entrepreneurship, and the key element of this habitat was mentoring. I am proud to say that my company has contributed to the creation of such a habitat. We were among the earliest to talk about mentoring and the risk mitigation strategy of mentoring.”  Her company has mentored women across Afghanistan, Ethiopia amongst many other underdeveloped countries.