In today's episode, I have the pleasure of inviting Taarini Kaur Dang. She is a high school girl, a Venture Capitalist, Forbes Writer, TEDx Speaker, and Women Empowerment Champion. Taarini is the youngest VC in the world. She is the Founder and Managing Partner of a Venture Capital firm called Brave14 Capital for which she has raised $870k in funding from top Venture Capitalists and Institutional Investors in the US.

Taarini is the youngest person to win the Young American-Indian Award which she received from the Indian Ambassador to the US Navtej Sarna for her work in Entrepreneurship in 2018. At the age of 13, she wrote a book (The Young Aspiring Entrepreneur) which has a foreword from Intel Capital President Wendell Brooks and quotes from Stanford Professor Chuck Eesley, Intel’s Chief Diversity Officer Barbara Whye, Oracle ex-President Ray Lane and author Linda Swindling. She has been an invited speaker at top conferences, like Google Launchpad Female Founders Summit, Collision conference, TiECon, Women’s March, ATEA, AI ShowBiz Summit, etc. She has been the only speaker under the age of 18 at these conferences. She has been featured in media by BBC, Nasdaq, Mercury News, etc. In 2019, she was ranked in Top 100 Women in Finance in India.

Taarini has also created a chat show to bring Entrepreneurship and Leadership lessons from stellar CEOs and VCs - she has already interviewed John Chambers (Cisco ex-CEO), Tim Draper (top VC), Vinod Kumar (CEO of Vodafone Business and Tata Communications ex-CEO), Dheeraj Pandey (Nutanix CEO), Kamran Ziaee (CenturyLink CIO), Quinn Li (Head of Qualcomm Ventures) and several executives from SAP, TechStars, etc. The chat show is coming soon.

Taarini is the co-Founder of a female empowerment Instagram account called @ClassyWomenn which has ramped to 620k followers in 2 years across 10 countries. She answers questions privately from women around the world on their problems in life, eg how to fight domestic violence, how to tell parents to let girls continue their education instead of getting married, choose a STEM career, etc. She has helped over 500 women on a one-on-one basis so far.

She did a summer internship at Nutanix after 9th grade and became one of their youngest interns ever. At Nutanix, she did market research on Desktop as a Service and Cloud Native apps. She also did a summer internship at Stanford University after 8th grade - she did research on Entrepreneurship models and paradigms while studying MIT/Stanford papers on these topics. Besides English, Taarini can speak and write basic Mandarin, and speak Hindi.

The Podcast is available on the following locations: