2 followers
Ritu Raj
Serial Entrepreneur, Prev Partner at Accenture

RituRaj has founded successful companies like BeingHappy, Objectively, OrchestratorMail, WagHotels (Built one of the Largest Chain of Dog Hotels in the world) and Avasta (Pioneered Cloud Computing, successfully sold to Navisite). Ritu was a Partner at Accenture and a Senior Executive at TMP Worldwide.

Sign in to Ask a Question
What are your thoughts on vitamin vs pain products. It appears that pain products (Uber, Enterprise, ) are easier to communicate because the need is obvious. The vitamin products tend to be very big (Twitter, Instagram) but the need is obvious only in hindsight.
  • When I think of startups I dont think of Vitamin vs Pain, I have been on both side of the spectrum. IMHO its all about scaling!
  • @WagHotels was a pain product, how ever its taken over a decade to scale it to cover the bay area only
  • On the other side @sidecar was a vitamin, can be said a pain to - and it could not scale as quickly as the competition
  • Some Vitamin products become a Pain. Imagine San Francisco with @uber - its hard to imagine
  • I love what @hnshah said about a Vitamin product that I was involved with - "its a solution looking for a problem"
  • I dont think of Twitter and Instagram as Vitamin - they are both solving a social problem at the highest level of abstraction
  • I do believe that @Twitter is not being valued correctly, do you have a valuation of the future of radio/tv its time will come
Do you invest in startups? What kind of startup you look for?
  • Short answer No. I am too much of an operator to stand on the side lines and empower the CEO and his team.
  • In the same vain I also do not take a role of an advisor, if asked I will share the operating insight.
  • I also do not consult with startups, unless I am taking on a short term operating role, normally as the COO
  • But saying all that I am really interested in using big data (data sets) to solve business and personal problems
Its really hard to quantify happiness. How does BeingHappy work? Do you have some tips for entrepreneurs to track user happiness?
  • Its hard to measure happiness as its based on the internal state psychological, cultural and the external environment health, weather
  • Happiness has a large varied data set, based on time and event, how does one correlate all of them to find a happiness score
  • BeingHappy uses a set of emotions as a register for the psychological state (self selected) and the external environment to score
  • Using fundamentals of data science we normalize our scoring algorithm to in time getting better at giving a happy score and predicting

Whats the story behind creating WagHotels?

There were two primary reasons - (1) I was done with technology, and more precisely IT consulting (2) I wanted to build something that people would come and buy from me, and I did not have to pitch anything. The long version was that in 1999, I...This knowledge is worth millions but signing up is free