Success Stories OYO Rooms has the contents of success stories Ritesh Agarwal. Ritesh Agarwal is an aspiring entrepreneur who founded OYO Rooms which is taking the market share in multiple countries at a higher growth rate.
Lets, read the motivation story of Ritesh Agarwal. How he started the journey and made the OYO Rooms such a success.
Success Stories OYO Rooms
So, I spend my childhood in a really really small town called a Riagara district.
This is the place where I was born. It was called Bassam Kotik, so it’s southern half of ERISA ERISA Andhra Pradesh part of a Naxal. Infested just to give you some background about this place.
The national average of literacy Sonny makes 60 or 70 percent or research literacy, averages from something like 60% the average literacy rate of regular district is less than 20%.
So I had very crazy and and sort of tough childhood especially because of the extremism that the town was going through at that point of time and probably goes through now as well.
I think at a lot of levels it was a blessing in disguise for me because I was not one of the usual kids because I couldn’t make a lot of friends.
I couldn’t spend a lot of time like a lot of other people did and so on and so forth I was thankful to my family for being able to send me to a school and and I and this was a Catholic school which they used to pay $3 a month as as my school fees for god bless that school
but had a great opportunity and a great childhood during this period was the first time I heard the word entrepreneur my sister our eldest sister used to be among the inspiration for all the younger guys
because she had done well for her self my sister was an inspiration and she’s one day showed up at her house and said you know I was back at this entrepreneurship here and at a college and if this sounds like a cool word I went on Google Google used to be really slow
I used to pay for this 150 rupee proud broadband even Google used to have this rotating thing like loading and I figured what that verse didn’t get what it was but
I felt this sounds really cool and this is what I want to become so you remember childhood days when you have all the children and teacher asking you what do you aspire to become everyone would say engineer doctor and
I used to say entrepreneur like that’s what I used to feel it’s felt like and everyone used to be like this guy’s gone crazy but that that is the level of commitment and clarity I had and it sounds very crazy for an eight-year-old that is what
I wanted to become and I felt so deeply about it post my 10th grade everyone in my school used to go to one of those senior high school or universities the same state so after
I wanted to do something different so I came to the northern half of the country and I used to travel through my childhood across the coastal areas in really cheap like this general train boxes through our childhood then
I had the support you have going to the northern part of the country because I really wanted to discover Hills there was a secret like my family never knew that different our child wants to study and my dad always wanted me to just come back and work with him at his shop but I really really wanted to avoid that for a long enough period of time
I’m glad I have so when I went there I used to literally take weekend buses Volvo buses that go to through kind hamachi in a bunch of these places and every pocket money and every size to do internships with various companies I would say I’d work for anything that you’d give me just for traveling and every weekend.
I would write emails to this hotel owner this resort owners etc and say guys can you please let me stay for free I want to solve something in this sector someday some of them would give it to me for free some of them would give me discounts and a lot of them would say screw you like we want you to pay the whole price
I didn’t care a lot so over this period I got the Porsche you to stay across 100 places in this country in more than 200 properties so it sounds like a less number but considering you just have 365 days in a year and it is just four years back that
I am talking about it was almost I was at one point of time I didn’t show up in my school for four months and I was just traveling so it was it was really crazy I had this instant hunger of sort of saying I want to solve something in this sector man
I mean why why do I have to go through these experiences so I can’t discover these places which are extremely affordable which
I always get to know after going to this town so it used to always happen I would land into a town wherever this bad owner should have asked me to pay the whole amount that’s some are worrying me but really I would try and find other hotels and it find places that were really really affordable so if I wanted to solve it you know as
I say necessary is the mother of invention so I started arrival which was India’s first marketplace of villas serviced apartments bed-and-breakfast etc etc for a period of six months and continue to travel during that period as well so this whole travel was happening during this period as well now what happened was this the bulk would have glowed but it is not for six months my my failure trail in life continued
I failed in two companies before oil came up the reality was during the six months everyone who stayed with us came back with issues that were significantly different everyone came back saying this will give you a jigsaw of experiences behind the city called the hotel owner
he won’t pick the phone reach the hotel no signboards reach inside the receptionist sleeping topless here in the bedroom mattresses torn apart washroom don’t have water there leaking all the time breakfast has gone pay by credit card and so on and so forth I feel terrible about it and you know what if but I felt that this is this problem
I started talking to a lot of people I knew and I said I want to solve this problem there is this real problem out there which is of having predictable experiences in this hotels why don’t I solve it and almost everyone told me hey you know what this is not scalable like this is anyone who’s been in this entrepreneurial community would hear this word and jog and very often but you know what I had heard something amazing which
I which I felt very deeply about and I did a lot of reading right Steve Jobs once said innovation is what differentiates leaders versus followers so feel like
I won’t be a leader I want to be someone who creates and salts for something and doesn’t do something for the sake of building a business so even if I operate just two hotels
I will operate them so well that consumers will at least have a better experience from what they have putting maybe it won’t be foolproof maybe you don’t be of one of the five starts but it will be definitely way better than what consumers have today and they can predict what kind of experiences they’re going to get during the same period came the turning period of my life I was a I was you know this was right after my senior high school
I told my parents that I was going to college I joined a college in Delhi I went there for two days and I felt I’ll go through the next day and one day I take took a leave to continue building arrival which was slowly becoming into more predictable experiences and I kept postponing that one day and that one day kept pushing to six months so my family didn’t know that I was actually not going to college and
I was staying back there building this company and I applied for this random thing called the Thiel fellowship this was end of 2013 crazy stuff during this period what’s quite funny is I was the application form was the most funniest part so I applied so the deadline is the 31st of December and I applied in the morning of January the 1st because the reality is this is Pacific Standard Time versus Indian Standard Time and this helped me so I never knew
I would actually make it because there was no indian as a part of this fellowship so just to give you a background peter thiel started this thing Peter is the founder of PayPal from the largest investors in Facebook and a bunch of large tech companies and his his view of the world is people who want to create disproportionate value
and solve large problems they don’t need the education of college they need education regardless and he could provide that education by enabling open mentorship something that was a great thing
so he basically gives hundred thousand dollars to 20 people under the age of 20 acceptance rates are lower than MIT Stanford in a bunch of this Ivy League’s the catch is here a drop out of college I felt this was amazing that you get paid not to go to college like who gets that so
I applied I had I was feeling excited about it just because of the whole application process right it asked me questions like what is that one contrarian thing that you think about this world that everyone else thinks you are nuts about and effort you know if you were trying to do
something inspirational and amazing you’re actually going to go nuts so many more times so God the poor should become a teal fellow first first Asian resident so was the most amazing period of my life Bill Doyle rooms
I think I’d love to share a little bit about how our rooms got built through this period we’ve disrupted a broader industry in this country which was sluggish for the last ten years and today is among the most exciting industries in the last two to two and a half months right in the last one and a half years people used to tell me I have gone nuts a year and a half back today we have for the first time in India
a company has innovated created in itself into what we have built ourselves we have 44 clones today across 15 countries which are getting financed every regular day to be modeled around oil rooms and today there is an oil for real estate oil for washing machines oil for what not at this point of time
as we scale we feel excited about having done something like this but what it came with is average of 3 death threats a week from real estate guys they don’t like us right because you basically went down and disrupted something as amazing as this and what
I wanted to share about it is every time something like this happens don’t be scared when you are there to put a dent in the universe people are going to get unhappy with you but that doesn’t really matter so today if you are across the country we call it haja oil
and as we build ourselves we built ourselves into the work in India’s largest planet hotel network and what we aspire to become is the world’s largest hotel network ever over the next couple of years from right here in India thank you so much
Success Stories Ritesh Agarwal
This was the success stories and journey of life of Entrepreneur Ritesh Agarwal. He is not only making money but also helping people to make money through his company.
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