WINSPIRE EMPOWERING YOUTH Issue 5 Volume 3 | Page 19

INSPIRATION

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Interesting facts about Pranay Chulet

• Pranay Chulet is the founder and CEO of quikr. com
• He holds a degree in chemical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
• He further studied MBA from Indian Institute of Management Calcutta.
• In 2007, he started his first entrepreneurial venture Excellere which was to develop web-based educational products.
• In 2008, he founded Kijiji India which was later renamed as Quikr.

Start-ups in India have taken a huge leap, now every individual has a thought of starting his own business. Gone are the days where people used to try harder to join their dream company. Today everybody wants to be the boss themselves; nobody wants to hear a‘ NO’ from their boss, instead they would rather create the work they love. There are numerous stories of people who have achieved success by establishing self employment. Here we come up with story of such dynamic person Pranay Chulet, successful entrepreneur, Co-Founder and CEO of Quikr, who influenced others to kick start their business. Quikr the firm that offers online classified advertising platforms for users to buy or sell goods and services from each other.

A Journey that led to Quikr. com!
Pranay was born in a small town of Rajasthan to a family where his father was a small time government officer working in mines as a general manager and his mother was a homemaker. Most of his early childhood days were spent in the mining towns of Dariba, Zawar and Maton in Rajasthan. He went to Kendriya Vidyalaya, where he was the first from his school— to appear for the IIT entrance examination. He got through and studied chemical engineering at IIT Delhi. Then he did his MBA from IIM Calcutta. Chulet got so far despite several odds. There was no science teacher at his school in Std X. Coaching institutes were a pipe dream. It was all down to Chulet, who studied day and night.
He began his career, soon after he completed his graduation from IIM-C in 1997. He joined as a brand management executive at Procter & Gamble, but this stint didn’ t go on for long and he quit it. In the same year, Pranay started working for Mitchell Madison Group as a Management Consultant. His basic job profile was to advice his clients in financial services and media industries. He worked with the group for almost 3 years, after which in 2000, looking at the Dot Com boom in the environment, he started his first venture called – Reference Check. Interestingly, it was pretty much similar to his current venture Quikr. Reference Check was an online medium between Service Providers( for Plumbers, Electricians, etc) and Consumers. The company eventually got merged with another bigger incubator called Walker Digital! He went on to work with Walker for a brief period to built and stabilize the company, before he joined PricewaterhouseCoopers( Associate Partner) and then Booz Allen Hamilton( Principal) in 2002 & 2005, respectively. His primary roles at both the companies were more or less, advising or consulting their clients from industries like Investment Banking, Media, etc. After giving almost 5 years of his life, he even started
WINSPIRE: Empowering youth | February, 2017