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The Art of

the Startup

Nahema Mehta wanted to escape her finance job
and work in the art world. But to do that, she
first needed to find an art problem worth solving.
by STEPHANIE SCHOMER

n 2010, Nahema Mehta was
working on Wall Street, enjoy-
ing a great deal of success, and

hating every minute of it. She
wanted to launch a side hustle—
I and having previously worked
at Sotheby’s, she landed on an idea to
revolutionize the art world: a web-
based service she called Art Remba

that connects novice art buyers with
professional art sellers. (This was in
contrast to how art was almost always
purchased, with a buyer having to

walk into a gallery.) It took a lot of
scrambling and convincing, but it paid
off. Within four years, she’d quit her
STEP 3/ Barter for talent. the key to Mehta’s eventual success.
Wall Street job and sold her company Mehta needed to build a digital “My pitch shifted from ‘Come
platform that would impress the online to sell art’ to ‘Wouldn’t you
to the spirits giant Absolut, which high-end art world—but she had like to expand your reach and
zero web design experience, and add to your current ecosystem with
renamed it Absolut Art and made her not enough money to hire someone. new tools?’ ” she says.
So she made an offer to friends
CEO. Here’s how she did it. who code: She’d trade her own STEP 5/ Show off your
knowledge for theirs. As it hap- success.
pened, one friend wanted to learn She targeted galleries she
STEP 1/ Find the bright idea. STEP 2/ Learn from future users. French—which Mehta is fluent in. respected, and had to pitch them
Mehta wanted a side hustle, but Mehta had a question: What prob- They traded equal hours of French three or four times. But she
at first didn’t have an idea. So she lems could she solve? “I asked the for coding work. knew that if one big gallery signed
considered her talents. “Friends gallerists, and I asked the consum- on, others would follow. Finally,
would always ask me where I got ers,” she says. Her friends had no STEP 4/ Focus your pitch. the team at Leila Heller Gallery—a
the artwork in my apartment, and idea how to purchase art that didn’t When she launched in 2010, the art giant in the art world—said yes. PHOTOGR APH BY ROBERTO CHAMORRO
I was like, ‘I’m taking you to the come from Ikea. Meanwhile, galleries world was not quick to embrace “I’d take the Leila Heller book
gallery so you can finally get rid of were desperate for fresh custom- the internet. “I got resistance from under my arm as I walked into a
your Che Guevara poster from uni- ers but clueless about reaching a everyone,” Mehta says. “People new meeting,” she says. “And if that
versity.’ ” And yet, her friends were digitally native generation. “Most were scared that this would gallery signed on, I’d take theirs,
intimidated by galleries. The light- galleries didn’t even have a website,” usurp their existing business.” too.” Within three months, she was
bulb went off: “Buying art is scary.” she says. Understanding that fear became running a profitable business.

32 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / November 2018