Teju Ravilochan

Teju is co-founder and CEO of the Unreasonable Institute. He is driven by the desire to live in a world where every human being can be the master of their own fate, unbound by the chains of poverty, oppression, or injustice.

Teju Ravilochan pushes entrepreneurs, fast and hard. He challenges their ideas, questions their assumptions. Complacency is unacceptable.

And if people think his expectations are unreasonable, that’s the whole point.

He’s the CEO and co-founder of the Unreasonable Institute in Boulder, which offers intensive five-week boot camps for entrepreneurs focused on tackling massive social and environmental challenges facing the world.

The name of the company comes from a quote by George Bernard Shaw, who said “all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Ravilochan, 28, has already landed on the list of America’s top 30 entrepreneurs under 30 by Inc. magazine, along with the institute’s founder, Daniel Epstein, and co-founder, Tyler Hartung.

Since the institute’s inception in 2009, these five-week sessions — which connect entrepreneurs to mentors and investors — have mushroomed. Last year, the institute launched two new Unreasonable Institutes: Unreasonable East Africa, in Kampala, Uganda, and Unreasonable Mexico, in Aguascalientes.

This year, it launched Unreasonable Labs — five-day sessions that address critical needs for early-stage ventures — in eight different countries, including India, Japan, Morocco, Ghana and New Zealand.

Three or four of those locations will become Unreasonable Institutes, run by local teams, which means Ravilochan spends most of his time traveling right now — flying to India, France, Mexico, and Ukraine in little more than a month.

His message is in demand, especially among millennials.