Meet Rahul Dhiman

We recently connected with Rahul Dhiman and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Rahul , great to have you with us today and excited to have you share your wisdom with our readers. Over the years, after speaking with countless do-ers, makers, builders, entrepreneurs, artists and more we’ve noticed that the ability to take risks is central to almost all stories of triumph and so we’re really interested in hearing about your journey with risk and how you developed your risk-taking ability.

I truly feel that my propensity towards taking risk came from two very different drivers in my life. One being, the fact that I grew up enamored by films. Particularly the films that told the story of an underdog, or of someone achieving a feat that seemed impossible to everyone else. The second driver that counterintuitively did this, was me studying engineering.

These two factors seem quite unrelated, and each of them actually seem as though they have nothing to do with taking risk, but they actually combined to create an environment where I was primed to take risk.

By studying Chemical Engineering at UC Berkeley, and having a “stable” job and degree to fall back on, I always had this safety net in my head. I would always tell myself, “worst case if this doesn’t work out, I won’t be homeless.”

And that’s all I really needed. For a few years 8 AM to 6 PM was dedicated to my day job. The other hours of the day were fully dedicated to moving the ball forward in taking risks. Whether that be investing all of my income into creating an independent television show, to starting my own company, I was in a space where the downsides of these risks seemed pretty benign to me.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I am an engineer-turned entrepreneur and filmmaker.

I graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Chemical Engineering in 2021. I have always had a passion for Deep Tech innovations, and that is what led me to working at Tesla and other battery startups on a mission to accelerate the future to a more sustainable energy world.

However, I realized that I didn’t like being an engineer. I didn’t enjoy being in the lab. I enjoyed telling stories. I enjoyed making films. I enjoyed running a business.

So every waking hour I had outside the lab, I dedicated to creating South Asian American stories. I, along with long-time friend Yash Hatkar, invested my own savings and a few years towards creating Upside Brown, an Indian-American TV series now streaming on Tubi. That led to me creating my own production company, Raninj Entertainment, where I dedicate every project to “Crafting universal stories, rooted in a South Asian heartbeat.” I have then since, produced a handful of short films and music videos through that company.

Simultaneously, I decided to take the jump from my full time engineering job, to co-founding Spiral Stories. Spiral is a deep tech storytelling and communications agency. It is truly a combination of my passion for technologies that are shaping the world and my passion for telling stories. Our mission is to help Deep Tech startups and founders raise $1B by the end of 2025, by helping founders leverage the power of storytelling.

I look forward to dedicating the rest of my life to uplifting founders, entrepreneurs, and artists in the Deep Tech and South Asian entertainment spaces.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

1. Storytelling

2. Experimenting

3. Resilience

For folks early on in their journey, in all honesty I do not want to give any advice. I myself am still super early in my journey at the age of 25. What I firmly believe though, is that these are the years to experiment and listen to your instinct in terms of who you truly are, what drives you, and what you are innately good at. Every new project or endeavor that I jumped into taught me something about myself, which helped lead me to a better place even if it may have initially felt like a “failure”.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

Deep Work by Cal Newport.

In today’s world, there are so many distractions at an arm’s distance from us at all times. We are equipped with more tools than ever before, but the number of distractions that are present has arguably outpaced that.

However, this means that there is an immense upside and reward for those who are able to minimize distractions and maximize their focus.

Working deeply, uninterrupted for an hour or more is something that used to be quite commonplace before the rise of smartphones, but nowadays I would bet most people haven’t had such a work session in a long time.

Being intentional about prioritizing the 3-4 hours in a day that you can use in a deep work state can compound into immense dividends over the years. Reading Deep Work truly changed the way that I structure my work day, but also taught me to value my time outside work and invest in more enriching activities.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.raninjentertainment.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/___rahuldhiman___/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahul-dhiman-287158119/