Rashesh Shah, the CEO of Edelweiss Group, was the wonder child right from his childhood. He was born on 30 September 1963 in a Gujarati family. The main family occupation was business so you can say that he was born with businessman blood in his veins.

The early life of Rashesh Shah

His school life was spent in Mumbai and after that, he enrolled himself in the KC College, Mumbai for a degree in Bachelor of Science in Statistics.

He had no intention of following the family tradition of joining the business and so after getting his bachelor’s degree. he studied exports at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade.

His childhood dream was to be an executive officer in a good company so he completed his MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in 1989.

After completing his MBA, he briefly joined the company Prime Securities Ltd but was unsatisfied with the work. So he joined one of the leading banks in the financial market, the ICICI Bank. He planned to settle down in ICICI for the time being.

In ICICI his work was interacting with new companies that were competing in the global financial market. He had to conduct meetings with the leading companies of that time like Infosys, and it was during this period in his life that he decided to build his startup.

He planned to work at ICICI for as long as he can to amass enough money to start his own business.

The economic situation of India at that time had started improving and a lot of new entrepreneurs started working in the global market.

He started gaining a lot of experience in entrepreneurship in this period of his life where he had to converse with a lot of foreign investors.

The Leap of Faith

However, starting a business in those days was a hectic process. The time period was mockingly called ‘Licence Raj’ because to start a company, a complex number of licences were required. There was a lot of bureaucratic red tapes that a person had to cross in order to start their own company, so starting a new business was not a very provocative idea and almost akin to a nightmare.

But in 1991, the then Finance Minister Dr Manmohan Singh made a lot of changes in the financial market and the opened the Indian economy for foreign and local trades by introducing the liberalisation policy in 1991.

It was during this period that Rashesh decided it was the opportune time to quit his job in ICICI and try his luck in building his own company. He saw many new changes in the capital markets as new companies started emerging. It was a very fertile period for entrepreneurship in India.

Source: Times Applaud