At 26 years of age, Ved Muthal, a Pune-based self-driven entrepreneur, is already scaling the mountain of success with his efforts and ingenuity towards the startup domain. Starting off as a corporate lawyer, Ved soon realized that he wanted to do something that he could call his own. He quit his job, started his first venture and became an application developer.
Initially, Ved was involved in the field of venture capitalism where he helped startups get funding from the various VC firms. Talking about why he got involved with this area, he says, “I have seen a lot of good startups fail just because of lack of access to quality funding. That’s when I decided to work with good startups and help them towards achieving their goals.”
Over the past few years, Ved has seen a lot of startups, successful and otherwise. He is really humbled by the experience and when asked about it, he says, “It i a learning curve. Every startup that I am involved with teaches me something and a lot of the credit of what I do today, I owe it to them.”
At present, Ved Muthal is the Co-Founder of PepperCorn Labs, which is an ERP solution company aimed towards the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) market. Hewas the founder of Travellanders. When asked about how it feels to take a startup into this very competitive market, he sagely says, “When has it not been competitive? In fact, this is the perfect time ‘to Startup’. When we started Travellanders, we were too early in the market, but we did see a market building up for our products and decided to sell Travellanders. About the same time, we realized that we could help businesses build something that is relevant to the current market and since we already had the right expertise we knew what we would be bringing to the table. That’s how we started Peppercorn Labs.”
When asked him about the burning topic of offbeat careers nowadays, he says that resistanceto non-typical career choices has in fact given birth to offbeat careers.People who have been in mainstream educational paths have also either found ordeveloped off beat career choices.
When askedabout his immediate plans, Ved has no hesitation in telling us that he will continue to direct his focus towards the product startups in the SME market and help them in building great products.
A true inspiration to talk to, Ved is very open and driven. He has certainly achieved much in his short years as a working professional. During our conversation, he told how Richard Branson has been a great influence on his life and credits Branson to the way he has built his life as an entrepreneur.
His advice to all budding entrepreneurs is: A ship in the harbour is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for. Stop playing it safe!
