Successful Entrepreneur

Ritesh Agarwal
The mastermind teen behind OYO Rooms!
The teenage boy – Ritesh Agarwal is the young Founder & CEO of OYO Rooms – fastest growing Brand
ed network of hotels offline & online.
With a current valuation of nearly 360Cr, OYO rooms does nothing out of the box but provides travellers
the coolest yet cheapest efficient, young, standardized rooms with no add-ons attached to it!

How did his journey begin?

The journey of our hero began rather early than normal!
Ritesh was born to a business class family in Bissam Cuttack in Orissa and attended the Sacred Heart
School in Rayagada, Orissa.
During the growing up days in Rayagada, Odisha, it was all about fun and learning for him but his ways
were rather unconventional from those of other kids.
His fun elements including screwing around with the computer, and trying hard to find opportunities to
make mistakes, so that he could learn new stuff. And doing that he gained a keen interest in software!
This started with the idea of it, moved on to knowing about it and then the hunger just went on increasing.
To quench his thirst, he borrowed his elder brother‟s books for programming. Some of the basic languages
like Basic and Pascal were taught in school itself and the rest he managed to learn from Google baba.
Interestingly, he had started coding when he was just eight years old. So software had obviously become
his love. And by the time he reached his 10th grade, he had made up his mind that he wanted to take up
coding for a living.
In 2009, Ritesh left for Kota to join IIT and in no time he figured that Kota was anything but a place
where one could learn coding. Hence, his dream of coding took a backseat and as he had a lot of time to
spare, he started attending Bansal Tutorials that his dad had got him enrolled into. The rest of the time he
used to just chill and travel around a lot.
He even started writing a book and ended up inscribing – ‘Indian Engineering Colleges: A Complete
Encyclopaedia of Top 100 Engineering Colleges’. This book turned out to become huge on Flipkart and
was sold out in a while too. In fact, the tutorials he went to also had this book and his picture was right on
the cover.
When he turned 16; Ritesh was chosen among the 240 children to be a part of the Asian Science Camp
held at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai. The camp was an annual forum for
pre-collegiate students who aimed at promoting discussion for the betterment of science in the region.
During that time; Ritesh due to the leverage of the free time also used to travel a lot, and stayed in PG‟s,
budget hotels, etc. And because there was nothing left to interest him about Kota, he often used to take a
train to Delhi. He used to stay at odd bed & breakfast (B&B) places and attend events and conferences to
meet entrepreneurs and because he couldn‟t afford the registration costs, he would often just sneak in.
And that is where it all started!
Life as an Entrepreneur…!

I. Formation of Oravel

In 2011, Ritesh moved to Delhi with intentions of starting up something of his own and at the same time
to prepare for SAT to move to the US for further studies.
Now, money back then was not a problem for him because he had savings from Kota and the pocket
money was good; roughly Rs.15000 for a month.
But fortunately or unfortunately, SAT never happened. Hence, he used to do nothing but meet and read
about entrepreneurs, start-ups, businesses, and especially Airbnb!
Now, Ritesh during his days had seen and always felt that budget hotels in India didn‟t even meet the very
basic needs of a budget traveller. Hence, capitalizing on this opportunity, he started his first venture in
2012 – Oravel Stays! It was an aggregator of bed and breakfast stays across India.
In simpler terms, it was meant to be destination for short and midterm rentals for bed and breakfast joints,
private rooms and serviced apartments.
In a matter of no time, he also secured funding of Rs 30 lakhs from VentureNursery, an accelerator firm
which brought together a bunch of storied investors to nurture start-ups.
With sufficient money in his pockets, he started working on his new found interest and at the same time,
he also presented his idea at the Thiel Fellowship – a global contest intended for students under the age
of 20. He managed to reach amongst the top ten winners who received a sum of $100,000 [over two years
(about Rs 2.7 lakhs / month)] as well as guidance and other resources, to drop out of school and create a
start-up, from PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor – Peter Thiel.
With the new found confidence, he started working even more rigorously but to his hard luck, their
business model didn‟t seem to be picking up. And as much as he tried, things just weren‟t falling in place.
Ritesh even got Manish Sinha of Gurgaon based Cinnamon Stays, as their co-founder but unfortunately, it
still didn‟t help and Manish eventually had to quit the company. As a matter of fact, they even tried
replicating the AirBnB model but that also didn‟t work and the company was not able to pick up or get
substantial transactions.

II. Transformation to OYO Rooms

That is when Ritesh went into the thinking mode and realized that, the biggest pain on the face of this
earth while travelling was to find a good, affordable & most importantly “available” hotel to stay in but
like always, most of us ended up staying in a crappy place with equally crappy staff, food, etc. which
killed the whole trip.
This also reminded of the time he used to face accommodation issues during his trips. There were times
when he was sold a crappy place for a huge amount and many-a-times he used find a nice place in a little
amount.
This got him motivated again, to create an online yet social community to bring information about all
good places together on one platform.
And as a last resort Ritesh tweaked his present business model and in 2013 re-launched Oravel as “OYO
Rooms”.

OYO Rooms was nothing but an idea to create India‟s largest chain of efficient, young, standardized
rooms with an intention to build the coolest chain of no add-on rooms which might not have Spa, Gym etc
like the star hotels but will live upto the basic standards & high expectations for prices like never before.
And to make sure the hotels met their expectations; OYO Rooms reached out to prospective hotels or a
hotel owner could also reach out to them, and OYO‟s team would visit the place, audit the hotel to
understand the changes that would be required to standardize the property as per OYO standards, and
shares the same with the hotels.
Moving on; apart from the funding, marketing, reaching out to the property owners and investors, some of
the stepping stones that he faced was – a mixed reaction from friends and family around him. But
nevertheless, that changed with time!
After the launch, Ritesh even got on board Bhawna Agarwal, former CEO at e-commerce firm
SeventyMM for critical business advising.
This time they decided to play it smart & safe, and made sure to leave no stone unturned. They tied-up
with a dozen numbers of hotels and with their help offered rooms to its customers.
And it worked exactly as planned! Things started to get better for them and to meet the demands they
eventually had to increase their team of two to fifteen and then twenty-five.
In 2014; the company raised Rs. 4 Cr from Lightspeed Venture Partners (LSVP) and DSG Consumer
Partners, at a pre-money valuation (valuation of a company prior to investment or financing) of Rs 14 Cr.
What motivated Ritesh even more was that, by now the company was clocking gross bookings of more
than Rs.1 Cr. per month.
Since then; OYO Rooms has gone on to become India‟s first technology driven network of standardized
branded budget hotels and has also widely expanded its presence to 350+ hotels and more than 4000 room
s in 20 cities like Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Goa, Jaipur, Hyderabad, etc, and also
aims to expand further to 1000 hotels in 25 cities by 2015 end.
Additionally, their OYO Rooms mobile app has been downloaded more than 160,000 times and more than
20,000 bookings have been made so far. The app ranks amongst the best-rated apps on Google Play Store
and has also been listed as one of the top three apps in the „Travel & Local‟ category.
More recently, the company has also raised another $25 Million from Lightspeed, Sequoia and others.
Accomplishments…!

 Awarded the TiE-Lumis Entrepreneurial Excellence Award (2014)

 The first resident Asian to win ‟20 Under 20‟ Thiel Fellowship (2013)
 Named one of the Top 50 Entrepreneurs by TATA First Dot Awards (2013)
 Finalist of Global Student Entrepreneurship Awards-India
 Named one of the „8 Hottest Teenage Start Up Founders in the World‟ by Business Insider (2013)
 World‟s Youngest CEO at 17(recognized at 16)