Nepal watches Shark Tank. Politicians should watch it twice
Entrepreneurs pitch dreams. The state hands them red tape
In a society where the term “valuation” is more likely to provoke a land dispute than a pitch deck, a prime-time business show has become an unlikely cultural phenomenon. Every Wednesday and Thursday evening millions of viewers across Nepal settle in to watch Shark Tank Nepal, a televised marketplace where entrepreneurs court investors under studio lights. Within two episodes, it has done something policymakers have struggled with for a long time: made entrepreneurship aspirational among Nepalis.
The show premiered on July 2nd with a promise to fund promising ventures from a pool of NPR 350–400m. The cast of sharks includes five industrialists drawn from the country’s sprawling family conglomerates—transport, finance, FMCG, among others. The format, borrowed from the Indian and American editions, is hardly novel. The risks, however, are distinctly Nepali. Over 20 episodes, 100 business founders will pitch for capital and more intangibly validation.
The programme has by now acquired the cultural status of a classroom. In Nepal, where formal business education is scarce, the show is a rare vehicle for public learning. Viewers are introduced to a working vocabulary of investment jargon—total addressable market, equity dilution, EBITDA, burn rate—that would normally be confined to Kathmandu’s handful of private MBA schools. In lieu of case studies, the audience gains an unvarnished lesson in the realities of entrepreneurship.
The show’s drama may draw viewers in, but its real power is in revealing raw entrepreneurial grit and dreams of founders. Nepalis are not new to enterprise. They are new to hearing it taken seriously. Entrepreneurship has long existed on the periphery: under-financed; over-regulated; and rarely discussed in national economic discourse. Yet the interest is palpable. By 2023 over 315,000 businesses were registered, a sharp bump from some 276,000 in 2021. Most remain micro in scale and margin, constrained by a state that mistakes inspection for support.
Policy remains a drag on productivity. Starting a business in Nepal officially takes 22.5 days—generous by the standards of South Asia’s 14.5-day average. Unofficially, the process stretches into weeks or months depending on the bureaucrat’s mood and the bribe’s size. Regulatory paperwork is labyrinthine. Electricity is unreliable. And transport routes fragmented. The cost of doing business is more than double the regional mean.
Banking does little to help. Lenders are conservative, collateral-focused, allergic to innovation. Notwithstanding the fanfare, long-promised government seed funds remain unspent. Early-stage firms, lacking both credit and credibility, commonly fail to grow beyond the founders’ kitchen table. Those that do must contend with a policy environment written for shopkeepers rather than scale-ups.
Against this backdrop Shark Tank Nepal feels less like television and more like a reckoning with the state of the economy. By pitching their products, entrepreneurs are also making the case for staying in Nepal. The show gives voice to a generation of doers who have for years lacked a microphone. Policymakers can no longer pretend they do not know what is broken.
What the show also underlines is a wider tension: Nepal is rich in young, digitally literate labour, but poor in systems to harness it. For years the state has exported its best human capital and imported its worst policy ideas. The fallout is a workforce raised on TikTok tutorials and passport queues, more fluent in migration logistics than market entry.
India by contrast has leaned into its startup moment. Shark Tank India has helped elevate entrepreneurship to a national obsession. Public funds, private accelerators, favourable tax regimes have followed. Indian firms are exporting modular electric vehicles, AI tutors, agritech platforms. Nepal meanwhile is still debating whether a digital signature counts as legal tender.
The divergence is more than superficial. Nepal’s economy is deeply integrated with India’s. Trade and labour markets cross porous borders. Yet without domestic capital formation and innovation, Nepali private sector risks becoming a mere supplier of inputs to Indian value chains, which are among others: cheap labour and raw goods.
Whether Shark Tank Nepal will disturb this pattern remains to be seen. The first season is already filmed, the deals already done. But the show’s more lasting impact may be in its exposure of the friction points in the economy. If taken seriously it could provide a rare feedback loop from the market to the ministries.
Politicians would do well to watch. Not to be entertained, but to be instructed. They would discover what Nepali entrepreneurs need most is not encouragement but competence. Not speeches but systems. A few simple fixes would go a long way. Digitising business registration, easing tax compliance and releasing public seed funds, among others, would reduce friction. Making it easier to wind down failing firms and harder for insiders to extract unearned privileges would boost investor confidence. Funding more platforms for business literacy—on or off television—would build a pipeline of better prepared founders.
The sharks have spoken. The question is whether the bureaucrats will bite. ■