Ritesh Agarwal

Ritesh Agarwal: is the young founder and CEO of OYO Rooms, the fastest
growing network of hotels, offline and online. The current evaluation of OYO
Rooms is over $400 million. OYO Rooms does nothing out of the box but provides
travelers the coolest yet cheapest budget hotels.Ritesh was born to a business
family in Orissa and attended the Sacred Heart School in Raygada, Orissa. During
the growing up days in Raygada, it was all about fun and learning for him. But
Ritesh’s ways were rather unconventional from those of other kids. His fun
elements included screwing around with the computer, trying hard to find
opportunities to make mistakes so that he could learn new stuff. As a result, he
gained a keen interest in softwares. This started with the idea of knowing more
about it and then the hunger just went on increasing. To quench his thirst to know
more, he borrowed his elder brother’s books for programming.Some of the fun
languages like Basic and Pascal were taught in school itself, and rest he managed
to learn from Google. He had started coding when he was just eight years old.
Hence, software had obviously become his first love. By the time he reached tenth
grade, he had made up his mind and wanted to take up coding for eleventh.

Later in 2011, Ritesh moved to Delhi with strong intentions of starting up

something of his own. At the same time, he also prepared for SAT to move to the
States for further studies. But fortunately or unfortunately, SAT never happened.
Thereafter he used to do nothing but read about entrepreneurs, startups, businesses
and especially, Airbnb.

Ritesh, later joined University of London’s course at Indian Business School. Just
after three days of joining, he could not control his craving to kickstart his venture.
So he took a day’s leave to work on the project and finally he never went back.
Ritesh always felt that the budget hotels in India didn’t even meet the very basic
needs of a budget traveler. Hence, capitalising on this opportunity, he started his
first venture in 2012 and called it Oravel Stays. It was an aggregator of bed and
break for stays across India. In a matter of no time, he secured a funding of 30
lakhs from VentureNursery, an accelerator firm which brought together a bunch of
investors to nurture startups.

With sufficient money in his pocket, he started working towards his new craze.
Simultaneously, he also presented his idea to Thiel Fellowship, a global contest for
students under the age 22. He managed to reach among the top 10 winners and
received a sum of $100,000 from Peter Thiel (the Co-Founder of PayPal and an
early Investor in Facebook). With this new found confidence, he started working
even more rigorously. But to his hard luck, business model didn’t seem to be
picking up. As much as he tried to fix, things just were not falling in place.

Ritesh then went into the thinking mode and realised, the biggest pain while
traveling was to find affordable and available hotels to stay in. But like always, we
always ended up staying in a crappy place. This motivated him to create an online
social community, to bring information about all good places together in one
platform. As a result, in 2013 he relaunched Oravel as OYO Rooms. The name
OYO means “On Your Own”. It was nothing but an idea to create India’s largest
chain of efficient, young and standardised budget rooms. Later in 2014, the
company raised 4Cr from LightSpeed Venture partners and DSG Consumer
Partners at a money.
Since the, OYO Room has went on to become India’s first technology driven
network to give standardised budget hotels in all major cities like Mumbai, Delhi,
Bangalore, Kolkata, etc.

Innovate Entrepreneur

When he started building OYO, the only thought on his mind was that he wanted
to solve a big problem.It's important to innovate and improve every day. You can
innovate through ideas, technology, or any other means. The goal is to better
yourself each day. When you are constantly improving, you are constantly moving
and when you are moving, more often than not you are making progress. The
chances you take might not always give you the results you want, but you will
learn. And like the saying goes, if you never try, you will never know. Most
importantly, don't be rigid, evolve. He started with Oravel Stays but soon realised
that what Oravel offered wasn't solving the problem at hand, so he started OYO
Rooms. And lastly, he really believe that one should not be scared to be different.
The crazier your idea is, the more doable it is. Also, it's also very important to be
persistent. In the end, the biggest risk is not taking any risks.

Presented by,
Dony Joseph