Vineeta Singh opens up about rejecting Rs 1 crore offer, choosing Rs 10,000 per-month salary instead: ‘It was the first of its kind in India’

Vineeta Singh, who is one of the judges on Shark Tank India, recently said that soon after she finished her MBA from IIM-Ahmedabad in 2007, she got a job offer of Rs 1 crore per annum, but she walked away from it. Instead, Vineeta started working on her own start-up, where she drew a salary of Rs 10,000 per month. Vineeta shared that the offer she got was the first of its kind in India, and she later regretted letting go of the opportunity.

In a chat with Curly Tales, Vineeta shared that back in 2007, Indian business school graduates would never get an offer of Rs 1 crore. “It was the first time in IIM Ahmedabad, there was one bank that actually stepped up and said, if we can give this to graduates from Harvard or Wharton, why are we not giving it to Indian B-school graduates? And they decided to up that offer to Rs 1 crore, which was actually about $200,000, and that made news because it was the first of its kind in India,” she recalled.

The co-founder of SUGAR Cosmetics revealed that she had never worked when that job offer came her way. “It also made news because I was just 23 at that time. I’d never worked anywhere. It was the idea of a young person getting a big offer, and that too a girl,” she said.

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Vineeta chose to let that offer go because she wanted to be an entrepreneur, and shared that she did not make anything close to that for “more than a decade.” When asked if she regretted her decision, Vineeta said, “Of course, many times,” and revealed that the first salary she made from her own services company was just Rs 10,000. Vineeta said that she was living in a simple one-room house in Mumbai at the time, where the ceiling would drip and the rent was Rs 5,000.

Shark Tank India Season 2 is presently in its finale week.