Ritesh gained an advantage of being a college dropout and that was the funding of $1,00,000 under the Thiel Fellowship. Ritesh became the first Indian to receive this fellowship.
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The business reality show Shark Tank India is all set to make a comeback with its third instalment on Sony LIV with a new addition to the panel. The new addition or the Shark is Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of OYO Rooms. According to reports, Ritesh has taken up many roles, from being the boss to the front desk manager, in his journey to becoming one of the most famous CEOs in the country. Today, he is one of the country’s youngest billionaires, but the path to becoming a CEO was not at all easy for him.
Ritesh hails from the Naxal-affected area of Odisha. He went to Kota in Rajasthan to prepare for the engineering exams. His preferences, however, changed after reaching Kota and he found his calling in doing business and not engineering. Ritesh completed his studies in BSc (Bachelor of Science) at a college in Delhi and also enrolled in a course in Economics. He, however, dropped out of the college in the first year.
He did not tell about this to his family and started selling SIM cards to pay for the expenses. He gained an advantage of being a college dropout and that was the funding of $1,00,000 under the Thiel Fellowship.
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Ritesh became the first Indian to receive this fellowship. Thiel Fellowship can be given only to college dropouts and those who are below 20 years old.
Ritesh’s journey in entrepreneurship started with an enterprise, going by the name, Oravel Stays in 2013. The concept of this startup was quite similar to OYO Rooms. People used to get information about the hotels with the most cheap booking rates. This idea, however, proved to be ineffective and couldn’t be sustained for a long time. Ritesh tried to find the reasons behind the failure of this venture by staying in hotels with the cheapest accommodation. He understood that the problem is not in finding low-cost hotels but in the facilities and standards they offer to customers. He thought that this can be fixed with a few changes.
Ritesh Agarwal made the changes and utilised the money received from the Thiel Fellowship to start the OYO Rooms venture. In an interview in 2015, Ritesh said that when he used to visit his relatives’ houses, he did not have the remote control of the TV.
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He wanted to watch cartoons but could not do it. He added that in the hotel, the remote control is in your hands and from here the idea of providing cheap hotels came to his mind. Today, Oyo Rooms is also working in China and its market valuation is $10 billion (about Rs 83,000 crore).
