Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath has on Wednesday introduced a funding and mentorship programme for entrepreneurs under the age of 22, the WTF Fund. The fund will back young entrepreneurs working in the beauty, home, fashion and lifestyle segments and they will receive mentorship from Kamath, Ananth Narayanan (founder of Mensa Brands), Raj Shamani (content creator) and Kishore Biyani (founder of Future Group).
Introducing the #WTFFund! Young entrepreneurs under 22 years of age can now grab the opportunity to secure funding and receive mentorship in the home, fashion, beauty or lifestyle sectors from @ANarayanan24, @rajshamani, Kishore, and myself.
The decision to launch the new fund was made during the latest episode of Kamath’s podcast ‘WTF is with Nikhil Kamath’.
“We normally do charity with every episode. We thought we'll do it differently as an experiment this time. We will pick an entrepreneur (under the age of 22) in either fashion, cosmetics or any of the industries we discussed who would otherwise not have got funding and we will fund them by virtue of this podcast,” said Kamath, during the episode 11 titled “WTF Goes into Building a Fashion, Beauty, or Home Brand” hile talking to Shamani, Narayanan and Biyani.
The Zerodha co-founder said the idea to set up a fund for young entrepreneurs was inspired by the story of the young founders of Zepto - Aadit Palecha and Kaivalya Vohra.
“In the last episode, we had the Zepto guys and the one thing they said that was so incredibly cool, is they got a grant of Rs 40 lakh from a fund when they were 18 and that's what helped them build Zepto,” Kamath added.
"I'm saying specifically 22 because these guys find it much harder to raise funding, typically in college, side project, not at zero but at the journey of going from zero to one
After a discussion, the four decided on a fund size of Rs 80 lakh in total with each investing Rs 20 lakh in it and help two companies grow with each getting Rs 40 lakh. “We will put out an application, have some pre-set filters, and we'll bring it down to say 10-15 companies. We can then do a Zoom call between the four of us and pick. We can also ask them to incorporate all they learned in this episode,” said Kamath.