India is waking up rapidly to an influx of brave new start-ups – often headed by brave new entrepreneurs. Case in point? Buzzfeed India, and the series of knock-offs it has spawned, such as ScoopWhoop, et al.
OYO is quickly rising up that list – particularly since it received a funding of USD 100 million (Rs 636 crores) from SoftBank Japan. But that’s not even the most striking part. For get this, the owner of the multi-million dollar start-up is a 21-year-old!
Ritesh Agarwal, in a recent interview to NDTV, claimed that his life was nothing short of a movie script – and one couldn’t help but agree.
The Boy Who “Slipped Out to Delhi” Started his Own Venture
His start-up is a technology-driven network of hotel rooms – one that would do wonderfully well in a tourism-driven country like India. It is Ritesh’s story, however, that is really making people sit up and take notice.
According to the NDTV report, Ritesh is a college dropout who once wanted to sit for an engineering exam. Despite coming from a well-off family (in Odisha), he sold sim cards to survive, to ensure his family didn’t find out about trying to make it on his own and crush his ambition.
In fact, as Ritesh glibly narrates to NDTV, he couldn’t wait to “slip out to Delhi” every chance he got on a weekend to meet other people like him who were starting their own business. All this while, of course, he was still supposedly preparing for his entrance exams to IIT.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Ritesh was only 18 when he set up OYO – at the time known as Oraval Stays (back in 2011) – a hotel rental startup.
“Checking into a New Room Every Night was Second Nature”
In an interview to Economic Times, Ritesh talks of how he would carry his possessions wherever he went before he began his hotel venture. In fact, that helped a great deal when he began his business – as checking into a new room every night became second nature.
It helps me get a pulse of what customers and hotel owners want and also gives me the convenience of not maintaining a home.
– Ritesh Agarwal, Founder of OYO to Economic Times
So much so, that Ritesh went on to stay at over 100 bed-and-breakfasts while running Oravel.
Ritesh’s interview with NDTV skirts around some of the controversies the young entrepreneur has gotten embroiled in – such as non-payment of salaries and the ouster of a co-founder – but it is clear Ritesh wants to talk about none of that.
In fact, the 21-year-old is well on his way to charting a new volume of entrepreneurial freedom.
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