House of Experts Ep 28: Vibha Kagzi in conversation with Dr. Ritesh Malik, the Founder & CEO of Innov8

House of Experts is a show that ReachIvy kick-started to help those who are unclear about their career choices. We hope through these sessions with some very successful people, we can shed light on a new career path every week. House of Experts plans to make a collection of interactive and informative sessions with experts from various domains.  
Vibha Kagzi, the host, is the Founder and CEO of ReachIvy.com, a premium study abroad and career consultancy organization. Vibha, a Harvard alumna, is a successful entrepreneur and believes in helping others chalk out their future careers.  
 
In Episode 28 of House of Experts, we were fortunate to host Dr. Ritesh Malik, the Founder & CEO of Innov8.

Dr. Ritesh Malik is a medical graduate who took a detour from conventional medicine to follow his passion for Entrepreneurship. In 2015, Ritesh started a co-working platform called Innov8. Today, his co-working space is spread across 11 cities and 35+ campuses.

Ritesh’s leadership and contribution to the Indian start-up ecosystem is widely recognized. He has been featured in Forbes 30 under 30 Asia (2016), Fortune 40 under 40 India (2018) to name a few.

Some excerpts from the interview: 

1. Can you tell us a little bit about your early years?

I was born and brought up in a middle-class Punjabi family. I was actually forced to study MBBS and become a doctor. I did that and started working at a hospital but I absolutely hated every moment of it. That’s when I realized I wanted to do something that would excite me. I took the risk left medicine and started on the path to become an entrepreneur.

2. According to you what are the hard skills that are required to be an entrepreneur?

I realized over time that you don’t need to have a set of hard skills to be an entrepreneur. I am still one of the weakest hard skilled people in the ecosystem. I feel my job is not to know a lot of hard skills, it is to know that I can embrace enough soft skills to have work with me one of the finest hard skilled people.

3. As an investor, what are the factors that you look at?

I think the most important thing to look at is as an investor is high tan business, high growth potential industries, high total addressable markets and extremely high integrity founders. It’s also important to look at the margins the business has. My personal learning is that don’t invest in industries that are extremely niche. Invest in large industries who have founders who are wildly energised to create a solution for a problem.

4. Can you talk about the important aspects of managing a company?

I think managing a company is nothing but managing people. Your job is to make sure that you manage the people working with you and making sure that you can create a lot of clarity for your team and the only skilled required for that is writing. I suggest you should switch off your phone for three hours a day and just focus on writing down a paper your thoughts, vision, direction, and measure everything. Apart from this treat your customers like god and build trust and then make sure you use your time to its best. Delegate the tasks you think others can do and save time on working on your vision.

We’re really grateful to Dr. Ritesh Malik for sharing his journey and valuable learnings with us.
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Missed out on the previous house of expert episodes? You can watch them here

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