Varya's new book to be published by Penguin Randomhouse
How to get published
We are happy to share that our product and government affairs leader Varya Srivastava would be writing her first book with Penguin Randomhouse, one of the world’s most sought after publishers.
Her book will focus on ambition in rising India. Ambition is the difference between where are and where we wish to be. In the months ahead, she will share how her draft evolves and interesting insights that come her way.
It will be a difficult book to write. That is perhaps what makes it interesting to Varya. She is driven by working on problems with many unknown unknowns. The harder the assignment, the better she gets.
Having worked on building Network Capital for the last 3 years, she has a unique positional advantage into exploring the nuances of GenZs of a country undergoing tectonic change culturally, technologically, politically and socially. In a way, the collective ambition of Network Capital community members shapes the culture of the organization. Ambition is perhaps the single common thread for our community. Varya will combine ethnographic insights, data and broader cultural trends to put forward her vision.
The journey towards getting this publishing contract was far from smooth. Incidentally there is no instruction manual for getting your book contract. Last year we shared one way to go about it. You can take a look below.
Publishers are flooded with proposals and ideas. It takes a lot of grit to stand out over a challenging period of back and forth before the deal is sealed. For someone in her early twenties to do that on a topic that many economists and sociologists have struggled to understand demonstrates maturity and clarity of a different order.
As always she was understated in celebrating her big news
In the coming weeks, she will be scheduling
office hours
community huddles
meetups
Feel free to join them. Who knows, you may feature in her book :)
P.S. If you don’t know who Varya is, please take a look at Utkarsh’s note
Today is Varya Srivastava’s birthday. She leads product and government affairs at Network Capital. While many newspaper articles have not mentioned her, I would like to take a moment to share the instrumental role she has played in shaping the company.
1. World Building: She strengthened our partnership with NITI Aayog and empowered Atal Innovation Mission Official ecosystem by deeply engaging with all stakeholders. Today the mission enables mentorship of almost 1.6 million school students. Her name was featued in the official report published by the government next to IBM.
Like NITI Aayog, she led partnership efforts with several organizations and did a stellar job of scaling the Network Capital mission
2. Product and Process Innovation: Network Capital has conducted 50+ nanodegrees and cohort based courses attended by thousands of students arond the world. A big chunk of the thinking and implementation was done by Varya Srivastava . Ask Mudrex Saurabh Kumar Shivangi Dewani Prateek Jain Ravish Bhatia(å™å¾·ä¼Ÿ) Bhanu Potta. In fact ask any of our fellowship faculty members
3. Culture Mapping: Network Capital has chapters from Lucknow to London, Patna to Paris. Offline events, community huddles, meetups take place in a way that is sensitive to the local context. Varya has played a wonderful role in scaling our culture across the globe and led the movement of adding specific value
4. Managing up and down: On a regular day, Varya engages with top CEOs, Network Capital patrons, government officials. She also spends 1:1 time with our community members, students, prospective members and goes out of the way to be helpful.
5. Calm: Network Capital 10xd on almost every measurable metric (profitability, impact, cohorts etc) from 2021. There was so much chaos at the backend. Varya managed it all with such grace and calm.
P.S. She is in her early twenties.
Happy birthday, Varya. We are all proud of you
Your Network Capital Team