Dream Machine

Meet Rameet Chawla, the New Yorker who’s combining technology, style and finance to become something of a futuristic trendsetter

- Meera Navlakha

“Cool is a perception,” says New York-based tech entrepreneur Rameet Chawla. “There’s always a collective, worldwide hallucination of what’s cool.”

Chawla is perceived as undeniably cool. The style maverick has more than a few feathers in his hat (sometimes quite literally). There’s the fact that Chawla has given talks at LSE and Google’s Zeitgeist. There’s his role as an angel investor in startups like Coinbase, a bitcoin wallet, and Artsy, known as a sound resource for making artworks accessible. There’s The Dutchess, his invite-only hotel, tucked away on a biodynamic farm in upstate New York.