Ronnie Screwvala
Rohinton Soli Screwvala, known professionally as Ronnie Screwvala, is an Indian entrepreneur, investor and film producer.
He has been named on Esquire's List of the 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century in 2008 and ranked 78 among the 100 most influential people in the world on the Time 100. He was also listed amongst 25 Asia's Most Powerful people by Fortune Magazine.
Based in Mumbai, India, Ronnie pioneered cable television, built a media and entertainment conglomerate that partnered with News Corp, 20th Century Fox, Disney Company">Disney India">Disney Company, and Bloomberg, and later in 2012, he divested the company to Disney for an enterprise value of US$1.4 billion.
From 2013 onward, he and his wife scaled their non-profit, The Swades Foundation, whose goal is to work with a million people in rural India, empower them, and move them out of poverty every 6-7 years before moving onto another geography.
He co-founded UpGrad, which is into online education in the higher education and specialization sector, founded a sports company—U Sports—spanning football, e-sports, and kabaddi, and through his investment company, Unilazer Ventures, has been a significant private equity investor in Indian start-ups with early stage investment and significant minority stakes. After his entrepreneurial period, he re-entered the media content industry to build a creative content company—RSVP—in movies and digital content and authored a book titled Dream with Your Eyes Open.
In his bid to expand, upGrad submitted a bid to buy assets of Byju's parent company, Think & Learn, signaling a major potential consolidation in India's edtech sector. He has also launched a personal $50 million fund to invest in early-stage AI, deeptech, and space-tech startups.
Early life and education
Screwvala was born in Bombay into a Parsi family. His father was an executive at the British firm J L Morrison and Smith & Nephew. Screwvala schooled and went to college in Mumbai at Cathedral and John Connon School and Sydenham College. Screwvala had a keen interest in theatre while in school and acted in professional plays with Bombay theatre as a hobby. He played notable roles in Shakespeare’s Othello and Death of a Salesman.Personal life
Screwvala is married to Zarina Mehta, his second marriage. Zarina has been a co-founder in the media company UTV they founded, and now is the co-Trustee of their Philanthropic foundation; The Swades Foundation. They live in Breach Candy, South Mumbai. His first wife, Manjula Nanavati and Screwvala have one daughter, Trishya Screwvala, who runs her own Not For Profit, The Lighthouse Project, and who is married to sports commentator Suhail Chandhok.Early days
Opportunistic in the early days of his entrepreneurship, Screwvala founded a toothbrush manufacturing company. Screwvala's is also credited with pioneering Cable TV in India at a time when there was a single terrestrial channel and grew that to multiple cities and most of the hotel chains in India.He hosted a quiz show Mashoor Mahal in Doordarshan in 1985.
United Television (UTV) 1990-2012
Screwvala founded UTV and over the period grew it into a media conglomerate spanning a leading movie studio, a Games Studio and creative content company that went public and listed on stock exchanges in 2005 and into which Disney gradually took a substantial stake until he divested the whole company to them in 2012.2013 onwards
The Swades Foundation
Along with his wife Zarina, Ronnie has founded The Swades Foundation, named after the acclaimed film he produced, whose goal is to lift a million people out of poverty.Presently, Swades is active in Raigad district in the state of Maharashtra in two thousand villages and involving half a million people. It is working on Water, Sanitation, Health, Education and the main focus is on Livelihood opportunities.