Entrepreneurship Series

Prior to following her passion and launching Didi’s Wardrobe, Dina spent 10 years in Investment Banking focused on equity and debt offerings and mergers & acquisitions. Ms. Patel began her career in New York City working for UBS and Deutsche Bank. Prior to Didi’s Wardrobe, she was at KeyBanc Capital Markets as a Vice President for the Restaurants investment banking team.

While merging her expertise in marketing and media, Shradha makes sure ContextMedia keeps up with the latest in product development strategies throughout various technologies.
As a broadcast journalism alum from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University with a concentration in economics and international relations, Shradha’s prior experiences has taken her into newsrooms at NBC Universal and CLTV. At NU she co-founded the Northwestern Business Review with Rishi and served as the Editor-in-Chief for two years developing the mission, plan and operations for the bi-annual magazine still distributed. She was featured by the NU Alumni Association as 1 of 30 most promising graduates in her class of 2,000 students.
Shradha has also done media buying for an international building technologies company, developed marketing strategy for a local election campaign and helped build the public relations practice for a Chicago-based national law firm.
Having grown up in Calcutta and lived in Delhi and Singapore, Shradha says she’s drawn to big cities. Chicago, however, is the city of her dreams. A speaker of five languages, she enjoys traveling and has been through most of Europe, Asia and North America fascinated by learning new cultures. Shradha is also a music and dance enthusiast, having run her own dance troupe that fused Contemporary dance forms with Indian Classical.

In his previous companies, he averaged 120% of a $18M goal, led 6 sales managers and 40 sales representatives increasing sales 200% per year. He closed several of the company’s largest deals in history and was the top closer for over 33 consecutive months. He also Instituted new sales programs bringing new accounts, increasing customer base by 75%. Niles has launched a financial division securing new accounts in a market where we had not before operated, creating an additional 250K per month of net profit.

His strong relationship creation skills help to penetrate and close new accounts. These skills were used to exceed a $1.5M goal for an Account Executive in Q1 of 2003 before his promotion to Vice President. In the first 8 months of employment at the same company, Niles increased direct sales in the company nearly 100%.

Niles has experience running an Advertising Consulting company and turned around declining company sales performance to exceed a $5M goal.

Niles has recently started a marketing company and co-founded a real estate firm in Chicago.

Rishi advises several early stage companies and serves on the Board of Directors of many civic organizations including the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and the Institute for Student Business Education at Northwestern University and serves as a mentor for Chicago’s technology start-up incubator, Excelerate Labs. He was recognized by Crain’s Chicago Business as a member of their 40-Under-40 class in 2009 and is an active member of the Executives Club of Chicago, the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center and the Illinois Technology Association.

He is past founder of the Northwestern Business Review, a Northwestern University-based collaborative publication distributed to more than 60 leading campuses nationwide. Prior to that, he founded a home computer consulting firm whose clients were acquired by Best Buy. Rishi has also founded several non-profit initiatives at the intersection of youth, education and media including the Urban-Suburban Domestic Exchange Initiative, a program sponsored by the Gates foundation to facilitate cross-school interaction.

Ankur is working on his 4th startup, ThankLab, a social consumer and corporate gifting app. Ankur's startup experience began in 1999 at UConnections.com where he launched a food & grocery delivery business. He helped rollout a similar program across 50 schools nationwide until the dot com bubble burst.

From 2001-2004, Ankur joined HedgeFund.net, a Guggenheim-owned startup that connected HNW individuals with hedge funds. Within a year, he took over and revived a distressed business unit as the youngest Vice President of the company. He turned the $1 million/year loss-leading unit into the most profitable division at the company producing $3 million in positive cash flow within 18 months.

Ankur spent the following 6 years as an investor at two prestigious multi-family offices. At BBR Partners, a Goldman spin-off, he was a member of the senior investment team allocating $4 billion across hedge funds and private equity funds. After 5 years there, he started Gift Side Story to help men everywhere stay off the couch by finding great gifts for their significant others. ThankLab is a natural evolution in gifting that helps individuals and companies maintain relationships more efficiently.

Ankur has been actively involved with Streetwise Partners, a non-profit that helps low-income individuals develop skills to find better jobs.