Young entrepreneur Ooshma Garg is notorious for carrying around stacks of paper to-do lists—up to ten at a time. The 23-year-old Stanford graduate owns two businesses and is in the middle of launching her third start-up venture. Garg co-founded her first business, Cardinal Tutors, while she was studying biomechanical engineering, which she casually described as “no cake walk.” Her junior year, instead of studying abroad in Beijing, she took the spring semester off to start Anapata, an online database connecting law firms with a diverse base of prospective applicants.
Anapata gained Garg recognition as one of Inc’s top 30 under 30 entrepreneurs and the business is now being acquired by a larger legal enterprises. Garg’s latest venture, Gobble, is currently in alpha mode on the West Coast. The launch of Gobble, an online marketplace for home-cooked food, has propelled Garg into the realm of venture-backable business. Owners of lifestyle businesses, like tutoring companies, can reach for hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but rarely make it to the billion-dollar mark. “This is a shoot-for-the- stars start-up business venture,” Garg said about Gobble. “Entrepreneurs are going hard or going home.”
For Garg, her first start-ups provided business lessons and a savvy foundation essential to the core of a consumer-based brand. “In starting your second business, it’s destined to be a longer term, father reaching business. Choose an industry you are truly passionate about to your core,” Garg advises young entrepreneurs. “This business is a part of your family and it’s going to be what you think about, eat and breathe for years.”
