Ragini Das is an Indian entrepreneur known for being the woman behind leap.club which is a woman-only professional and private network aiming at encouraging and empowering women to take the lead.
Ragini, a passionate young woman with a mission to empower women from all corners of the world, has managed to build an inclusive platform exclusively for women to excel in every aspect of their lives.
Early life and humble beginning
Ragini was born in Delhi and grew up in different parts of India. Her dad was in the army so her family had to move every now and then. She graduated in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Lancaster University, United Kingdom.
Shortly after graduating, she worked with Trident but soon left the job as it failed to meet her preferences. In November 2013, she started working for Zomato as a Sales and Marketing Manager.
She also had other job positions like Area Sales Manager and Key Account Manager throughout the whole 6 years she worked there. Right around November 2019, she had a discussion with Anand, her boss at Zomato [now a co-founder of leap.com] about insufficient professional networking sites and they decided to work on building a networking platform themselves.
She liked the idea but it wasn’t enough of a drive for her to quit her well-established job at Zomato. One might ask what changed. The minute it was mutually decided to make the platform women-centric, she was all in and ready to give everything she’d got for the company.
Her journey towards building leap.club
How frequently have you seen leadership positions being assigned to a woman? How many times have you noticed gender bias affecting a woman’s job? How often have you seen women overpower men in terms of their number?
It’s not very often that we get to see incredible women taking charge due to the unending male-dominated work environments. Ragini noticed this imbalance after observing sixty men and just two women at a venture capital partner meeting.
This was her trigger to just go for it. Around December 2019, she spent all her days researching and reaching out to different women in order to gain some insight into what could possibly be done to create a platform that makes a significant difference.
The initial idea was to build an offline platform for women. But right after Covid hit, they had to shift all their resources into building an online site and app. It was quite a bit of a hustle but they managed it just fine and investors kept pouring in despite spending zero money on marketing. The company had 30 founder members that helped kickstart their journey.
Ragini recalled a wholesome story about this amazing community of members at leap.club. During one of her member meetings when one of the founder members had tears in her eyes as she couldn’t remember the last time she saw 30 women on a call rooting for each other and hyping each other up as they did.
Success Story of leap.club
Today, thousands of women join the platform every single month and Ragini has managed to have a positive impact on the lives of tens and thousands of women all around the globe.
She has also been awarded Economics Times Young Leader in 2018 and LinkedIn Top Voice 2021 for her life-altering and prominent voice.
On December 10th, leap.club organized its first 500+ member networking event [All women!] called ‘the leap (af)fair’ in Delhi NCR to address important topics about women in workplaces and to establish meaningful connections amongst the community of women.
Her timeless advice for achieving a work-life balance would be to actually include things you love to do into your to-do lists so that you don’t forget to take time off for them.
Besides this, Ragini is a morning person and for some reason, she actually enjoys waking up at 5 am. She loves to have conversations about culture, startups and young women in business. She is a massive foodie and you can often find her thinking about her next meal!
She’s been through a lot of ups and downs while building her career but says that she’s insanely lucky to have such amazing and resilient members beside her with every leap she takes.
She says that taking a risky leap from Zomato to leap.club is the best decision she’s made till now.
From working at Zomato to building a remarkable company with over 10,000 delighted and empowered paid members, her ‘leap’ paid off very very well!
