Crouching in a flowing, saffron robe — a blood-red desert sunset behind him; a leggy, Las Vegas showgirl hovering beside him — he could be a mystical shaman.
Instead, Rameet Chawla is a tech entrepreneur, one whose company is worth many millions.
Mark Zuckerberg can use style pointers.Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Unlike the fleece-hoodied nerd herd led by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Chawla channels his inner peacock: high tech meets the high life.
"The way I dress gets me noticed and attracts clients," says the man whose mobile-app design and development company Fueled is worth an estimated $30 million. "I'm on a personal crusade to try and make people in this industry dress a little sharper.
"A lot of people in the tech world have embraced this culture of sweatpants and casual wear, but I like to shake it up."
And so he has. The shaggily handsome 6-footer is making his own way with his flamboyant fashion sense, good looks, larger-than-life personality and outsize enthusiasm for code that turns the stereotype of the dorky tech worker on its (pointy) head.
Last year, he was listed in the Next Web's "50 People to Watch" and hailed as an app whiz for his work with companies both startup and huge, like GoDaddy and Gilt Groupe.
At the same time, the single Tribeca resident is a fixture on the downtown and Brooklyn party scene, and was one of online fashion magazine Style-Caster's picks for "Most Stylish New Yorker." He has an impressive collection of ascot neckties, 30 suits plus a collection of bespoke hats (cowboy and otherwise) made by artisanal milleners.
Though he bikes to work at his Soho office, he happens to own a mountain — or at least co-owns one, the expansive Powder Mountain ski resort in Utah, which he shares with 30 other leading tech entrepreneurs who use it as a base for schmoozing.
His associates are a roll call of Silicon Valley A-listers who include ZocDoc co-founder Cyrus Massoumi and Garrett Camp, the driving force behind the mobile car service Uber.
"We built a camp together in the desert this year for Burning Man," Chawla says of the site where that desert photo was taken. "It was a lot of fun, but, as with everything I do, a great opportunity to meet people and talk business."
Rameet Chawla's wardrobe and sense of office decor challenge tech-millionaire stereotypes.Photo: Brian Zak/NY Post
A workaholic who puts in at least 14 hours a day, often clocking out at 3:30 a.m., he has rapidly accelerated Fueled since its launch in January 2011. He now employs 85 people in offices in New York, Chicago, London and England's Newcastle upon Tyne, and plans to open another hub in Russia. The company also owns stock in more than 30 startups, but its key source of revenue is app development.
It's been quite the ride for the former financial analyst who quit investment banking in 2007 because he "didn't fit into the corporate world" — and couldn't get up in time for 9 a.m. meetings.
At the time, his strict, Indian-born parents despaired. Traditionalists both — theirs is an arranged marriage — they brought up Chawla and his older sister to join the corporate rat race. (His sister, Shabani, 33, is now a photographer and mother of two in Boca Raton, Fla.) Then again, Chawla's used to not fitting in: Born in tony Dix Hills, LI, he grew up in Boca, where he says his was only one of only nine non-Jewish families among the 1,600 in his neighborhood.
He went to NYU, where he graduated with a degree in finance, international business and computer systems. From there, he leapt right into Merrill Lynch and then Oppenheimer, where he was on the management path with a six-figure salary.
But he wasn't happy.
"I wanted to get a job working for myself, but my father, who'd obviously paid for my education, said, 'You put the time in. You climb the ladder.' " Instead, Chawla jumped off, traveled through Thailand, India and France — and started working on his apps.
"I've always had a problem with authority figures," he says.
These days he follows a daily schedule he designed himself, one that divides each day into three seven-hour sections plus three hours for leisure. That translates to 14-hour working days, plus seven hours for sleep, one hour for both unwinding and waking — and two hours socializing or eating. A foodie, he eats out every night of the week, rarely at the same restaurant twice.
"You can't help but smile whenever you run into Rameet," says ZocDoc's Massoumi. "His passion and energy are infectious, and his diverse talents never cease to surprise me."
One of those talents is Chawla's propensity for breaking the rules. In February, he designed a software program to automatically "like" every photo that passed through his Instagram feed.
"I was intrigued because people get such a high when their posts get likes," Chawla says. "It's an addiction of the social-media age, like crack cocaine. If all my Instagram friends feel great when they're getting likes, why not make them happy in an automated way that's easier for me, too?"
So he developed the free app called Lovematically, which did just that. Not surprisingly, Instagram shut it down within five hours. "It breached their terms and conditions," Chawla says, laughing. But the resulting publicity gave him an average of 30 new Instagram followers per day.
He's now dipping his toes into the world of selfies, posting spectacular, staged Instagrams in outlandish guises, like the one at Burning Man. (Often beside him is model and fellow startup entrepreneur Zuzanna Buchwald, 25, whom he calls his "traveling companion.")
He's also been shot in Japan wearing a kimono and a beaded headdress.
And then there's the one of him last May, dancing in the mosh pit at a concert in Brooklyn. In a long white robe, he looks like Jesus Christ.
"Everyone started saying that I looked like Jesus when I put my hair down," says Chawla, whose flowing locks stretch past his shoulders. "So I figured that, if I just went ahead and fully embraced it, everyone would get a huge kick out of it."
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