Taarini Dang

Taarini Kaur Dang is the youngest Venture Capitalist, a Forbes Writer, TEDx Speaker, and Diversity Empowerment Champion. She is the Founder and Managing Partner of a Venture Capital firm called Brave14 Capital for which she raised $870k in funding during her high school years from top Venture Capitalists and Institutional Investors in the US. She has been featured by BBC, Nasdaq, Bloomberg TV, Mercury News, etc. In 2019, she was ranked in the Top 100 Women in Finance in India. 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. Taarini conducted research on Entrepreneurship definitions, contradictions, and 8-variable multicollinearity models via variance inflation factors. She also researched the impact of digital technologies on Liability of Foreignness for Entrepreneurship in a forced immigration context. She did a case study by designing a Stanford online course to teach entrepreneurship to Ethiopian Refugees. She published these findings as a paper in IEEE (top peer-reviewed proceedings) and presented at the conference. Paper is at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9590736 Taarini has created The High School Girl Chat Show to bring entrepreneurship and leadership lessons from stellar CEOs and VCs - she interviewed John Chambers (Cisco ex-CEO), Tim Draper (top VC), Vinod Kumar (CEO of Vodafone Business and Tata Communications ex-CEO), Dheeraj Pandey (Nutanix ex-CEO), Kamran Ziaee (Sr VP, Verizon), Quinn Li (Head of Qualcomm Ventures) and executives from SAP, TechStars, etc. Taarini is the co-founder of a diversity empowerment Instagram account called @ClassyWomenn, which has ramped to 1.1 million followers across 10 countries. She has done summer internships at Cisco, Nutanix, and DevRev. She was one of the youngest interns ever at Nutanix where she did market research on Desktop as a Service and Cloud-Native apps. Taarini can speak and write basic Mandarin, and speak Hindi.