ET BureauMUMBAI: When Ritesh Agarwal walked into a meeting with venture investor Bejul Somaia last year, his rucksack attracted immediate attention. Curious as to what the young entrepreneur was carting around, Somaia asked him about it and was amazed to hear the answer.
For Agarwal, who left home in Odisha as a teenager to seek his fortune, carrying all his possessions wherever he went was second nature. And now, as cofounder of an online aggregator of budget hotel rooms, checking into a new room every night was also business.
“It helps me get a pulse of what customers and hotel owners want and also gives me the convenience of not maintaining a home,” says the itinerant founder whose startup, OYO Rooms, has recently raised funds from Japan’s SoftBank.
Some four years after he landed in Delhi, Agarwal, who once sold SIM cards in his hometown, has built one of the most valuable Internet startups in India by a college dropout.
The hands-on approach is a big reason why Agarwal has been able to aggressively ramp up OYO Rooms from five cities in December 2014 to 73 cities now.
“He has a very strong grip on all the levers of the business. In five minutes he can go from a strategic conversation to drilling down into the minute details important to a property owner,” said Somaia, whose firm Lightspeed invested in OYO in January 2014.
Agarwal, hailing from a business family, moved to Delhi in 2011 to start his entrepreneurial journey after deciding to skip engineering college entrance exams. He had also briefly enrolled in University of London’s India campus.
It was when he was 18 that he founded Oravel Stays, which was building the Indian version of home sharing portal AirBnB. Agarwal got in touch with accelerator VentureNursery, flew down to Mumbai and got seed funding of around Rs 30 lakh after a three-month programme.
Agarwal, who stayed at over 100 bed-and-breakfast rooms while running Oravel, soon discovered that the problem for these portals was not discovery. “The big problem was that these portals are not standardised,” said Agarwal.
It was around the same time that Agarwal became the first Indian to be chosen for Thiel Fellowship, where he was given $100,000 grant by early Facebook investor and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel. The fellowship is given to entrepreneurs below 20 years of age who skip college for two years to start running their own business.
“One big learning from Thiel fellowship was think really big and create an impact, without thinking if anybody has done it before,” said Agarwal, who decided to pivot the model to OYO Rooms, putting most of the Thiel grant into the business.
And investors feel that Agarwal has the maturity to build an organisation and execution capabilities. “I always thought Ritesh was unusual for his age (or any age) in terms of his clarity of thought and purpose. He embraces the concept of hiring people better than him and giving them the freedom to contribute,” said Somaia, adding that experienced founders also struggle with this.
Perhaps as part of his growing up, Agarwal decided to move out of OYO to an apartment two months ago.
For Agarwal, who left home in Odisha as a teenager to seek his fortune, carrying all his possessions wherever he went was second nature. And now, as cofounder of an online aggregator of budget hotel rooms, checking into a new room every night was also business.
“It helps me get a pulse of what customers and hotel owners want and also gives me the convenience of not maintaining a home,” says the itinerant founder whose startup, OYO Rooms, has recently raised funds from Japan’s SoftBank.
Some four years after he landed in Delhi, Agarwal, who once sold SIM cards in his hometown, has built one of the most valuable Internet startups in India by a college dropout.
The hands-on approach is a big reason why Agarwal has been able to aggressively ramp up OYO Rooms from five cities in December 2014 to 73 cities now.
“He has a very strong grip on all the levers of the business. In five minutes he can go from a strategic conversation to drilling down into the minute details important to a property owner,” said Somaia, whose firm Lightspeed invested in OYO in January 2014.
Agarwal, hailing from a business family, moved to Delhi in 2011 to start his entrepreneurial journey after deciding to skip engineering college entrance exams. He had also briefly enrolled in University of London’s India campus.
It was when he was 18 that he founded Oravel Stays, which was building the Indian version of home sharing portal AirBnB. Agarwal got in touch with accelerator VentureNursery, flew down to Mumbai and got seed funding of around Rs 30 lakh after a three-month programme.
Agarwal, who stayed at over 100 bed-and-breakfast rooms while running Oravel, soon discovered that the problem for these portals was not discovery. “The big problem was that these portals are not standardised,” said Agarwal.
It was around the same time that Agarwal became the first Indian to be chosen for Thiel Fellowship, where he was given $100,000 grant by early Facebook investor and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel. The fellowship is given to entrepreneurs below 20 years of age who skip college for two years to start running their own business.
“One big learning from Thiel fellowship was think really big and create an impact, without thinking if anybody has done it before,” said Agarwal, who decided to pivot the model to OYO Rooms, putting most of the Thiel grant into the business.
And investors feel that Agarwal has the maturity to build an organisation and execution capabilities. “I always thought Ritesh was unusual for his age (or any age) in terms of his clarity of thought and purpose. He embraces the concept of hiring people better than him and giving them the freedom to contribute,” said Somaia, adding that experienced founders also struggle with this.
Perhaps as part of his growing up, Agarwal decided to move out of OYO to an apartment two months ago.
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