Entrepreneurship isn’t just about making your venture profitable. It is also about self-vindication, creating value for stakeholders, leading a change, bending rules, and surviving all odds. Here’s how four of them did it
When Vijay Shekhar Sharma started Paytm in 2010, he had already left behind a past that would be best described “eventful”. A topper in school, the Aligarh-born founder- CEO of the popular mobile wallet got admission to an engineering college in 1994, when he was just 15. He started his first company XS Corps four years later and sold it as well -- all while still studying in college. Then he worked with a few companies in fairly senior roles before launching One97, a value-added services (VAS) player, in 2000. Then 9/11 happened and his business crashed.
“I was left with no money. I started using public transport and literally lived on two cups of tea. My father asked me to take up a job. I was 25 years old and the family wanted me to get married. But no one was willing to marry me,” says the Delhi College of Engineering alumnus.
He took up a job as a consultant to sustain himself. Later, with smartphones becoming popular, Sharma decided to do something around it. “I always wanted to impact people’s lives,” he offers. It was then that Paytm, a mobile wallet, came into existence. And then, like his past, his future too took the word “eventful” to a whole new level. Today, Paytm is considered one of India’s largest mobile payment and commerce platforms. With a current user-base of more than 100 million, Paytm is on a mission to bring half a billion Indians to the mainstream of economy using mobile payment, mobile commerce and the soon-to-be-launched payment banking services. Headquartered in Delhi-NCR, Paytm today boasts of investors such as the Alibaba Group from China, and legendary businessman Ratan Tata, among others.
MAKING A DIFFERENCE
Like Paytm, Deep Kalra of MakeMyTrip, too, took early advantage of a niche ecommerce sector to become an undisputed leader in the online travel industry in India. Founded in 2000, the Gurgaon-headquartered company saw the heady days of the low-cost carriers (LCCs) -- also known as no-frills, discount or budget carriers or airlines -- when taking a flight was suddenly within the reach of middle-class India. The unbelievable onerupee fares came to a halt soon, but not before inspiring a whole new generation with love for travel and impulse holidays.
The online travel agency (OTA) recorded sales of Rs 1,000 crore and a break-even in 2008 itself, just eight years after its launch. Today, MakeMyTrip is much more than just a travel portal or a famous pioneering brand -- it is a one-stop travel shop that offers the broadest selection of travel products and services in India, including online hotel reservations, holiday package bookings, and rail and bus ticket bookings. In the fiscal year 2015, the website had an average of over 7.8 million unique visitors per month. With over 12 million downloads (to date), MakeMyTrip’s mobile app is considered to be one of the most widely used travel apps in India.
MakeMyTrip recently completed a decade of its India operations -- it was launched in the US market in 2000, to cater to the overseas Indian community for their US-to-India travel needs, but it made its India debut only in September 2005, with its “lowest airfare guarantee”. On the momentous occasion, Kalra, its founding chairman and Group CEO, says: “As the partner and enabler in this journey, we had a ringside view. From being among the first OTA in the world to offer low-cost inventory online and launching the first iPhone travel app in India, besides opening up new avenues for Indian travellers and travelpartners alike, we ushered many first-inindustry offerings. Today, we have a dominant position in the OTA market as a whole, and especially in flights, mobile and hotel transactions.”
Sharma and Kalra are part of a bunch of entrepreneurs who tried to differentiate themselves among a world full of great ideas and causes, to become game-changers in their own right. They successfully turned their passion and mission into a groundswell of energy that are touching millions of lives in the country and beyond. What these new-age entrepreneurs have in common is an understanding of the power of technology and the new media and an ability to charge people up with their mission.
AGENTS OF CHANGE
OYO Rooms Founder Ritesh Agarwal embarked on his entrepreneurial journey when he was only 17 years old. A college dropout, Agarwal was chosen for the Thiel Fellowship in 2012, which entailed him to a grant of $100,000. The fellowship, created by PayPal founder, Peter Thiel, provides grant to college dropouts under 22 years of age to pursue their ideas. Agarwal is the first resident Indian Thiel fellow.
During this time, he travelled extensively across the country and stayed at over 100 budget hotels, which made him realise how difficult it was to get a pleasant and reliable “consumer experience” in this segment. In a quest to make these affordable stays as “real” as possible, Agarwal launched Oravel Stays in 2012. Oravel was modelled after USbased Airbnb. However, by 2013, Agarwal realised that a mere aggregation of beds and breakfasts couldn't address the problems of budget travelers in India and hence, he pivoted Oravel Stays into OYO Rooms.
Today, OYO Rooms has become synonymous with budget travel in the country, offering an unmatched proposition to its consumers at affordable prices that start as low as Rs 999. Besides bed and breakfast, OYO Rooms promises every customer a comfortable stay that includes an AC room and Wi-Fi with 24x7 customer service support. At a little over 22 years now, Agarwal made headlines this year after his startup got funding of $100 million (approximately Rs 636 crore) by Japan's SoftBank Group.
news. What's also caught people's eye, apart from his age, is his story. Agarwal never studied beyond school and even sold SIM cards to survive, afraid that his well-off family based in Cuttack, Odisha, would end his entrepreneurial dreams and summon him back home if they knew of his struggles. In Kota, where he was ostensibly preparing for his IIT entrance exams, Agarwal says he couldn't wait every weekend to slip out to Delhi and meet those doing their own thing. In a recent interview to a news portal, Agarwal says: “I am today a strong believer of the often-heard advice that the best education often happens outside a classroom. I dropped out of college within days of joining because I felt that attending classes would slow me down from doing what I really wanted to do -- building my own startup.”
DRIVING IN THE FAST LANE
The entrepreneurial itch is what also drove IIT-Bombay graduates Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati to start Ola Cabs, undoubtedly India's most popular mobile app for booking cabs right now. In 2010, Aggarwal -- then 24 years old -- saw the amount of potential that an extraordinary cab booking service could have when he himself faced numerous problems looking for quality cab services. He realised how his plight was probably similar to a lot of customers across the country, which ended up with a cab that stood them up, arrived and dropped them off late, didn’t stick to its promises, and came with drivers that were nightmares behind wheels.
Aggarwal was soon joined by his cofounder Bhati in his start-up journey and thus was born Ola Cabs. “My parents believed I’d gone crazy. They thought I was becoming some kind of a travel agent and were very apprehensive about it. But things started changing. The first round of funding from two angel investors came in as a stamp of approval for the idea and the growth has led them to believe in me now,” the Ludhianaborn Aggarwal was quoted as saying to an online media platform.
Ola has recently closed the Series F funding, raising $500 million (roughly Rs 3,306 crore) from Baillie Gifford, China's Didi Kuaidi and existing investors, including Falcon Edge Capital, Tiger Global, SoftBank Group and DST Global. With the current round, Ola has closed over $1.3 billion (roughly Rs 8,600 crore) of external funding, of which over $1.2 billion (roughly Rs 7,936 crore) has been raised over the past year. In April, Ola had raised $400 million (roughly Rs 2,645 crore) in funding, led by DST Global (in Series E) and prior to that, $210 million (roughly Rs. 1,388 crores) led by SoftBank Group (Series D in October 2014). With over 3,50,000 vehicles registered on its platform, Ola today offers services across 102 cities in India.
So what do these game-changers feel about the kind of position that they have reached today? “I am of the opinion that life got better with mobile payments. Cash creates corruption in the economy. Ecommerce can help to remove that,” says Sharma of Paytm. Kalra of MakeMyTrip adds: “The passion for winning goes beyond merely chasing targets and achieving them. It's the zest and zeal with which one goes about the achievement. It's not only about winning, it's about dominating.”