Ritesh Agarwal Success Story
From an ordinary boy to a multi-millionaire, here’s to how Ritesh Agrawal made it to the top 50 entrepreneurs in India in 2013. The success story of the mastermind behind Oyo rooms follows the proverb that “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
Ritesh Agarwal – Journey of a small-town boy to a multi-millionaire
Ritesh Agarwal Story:
Ritesh Agrawal, the CEO of Oyo rooms, hailed from a small town in Bissam in Cuttack, Orissa. He was born in a middle-class household on Nov 16th, 1993. Being different from the rest of his school mates, he decided to be an entrepreneur at the age of 8.
Ritesh says that he first heard this word from his elder sister, who was an inspiration to the family, and this made him decide that he wanted to be one, as he felt the word was very cool. He always termed himself distinct from others to which he says, was a Blessing in Disguise for him and which led him to follow his passion.
Ritesh Agarwal Life Story:
Ritesh was far more different than his fellow mates. He’s out of the box thinking always made him do different things. Being unconventional in his approach from the very beginning, he developed a passion for technology or to be more precise “coding”.
He started developing an interest in software, and later on, his thirst increased to know more about programming and coding as well, so to quench his thirst, he even brought his brother’s programming books and started digging in.
Gradually his interest grew in this field, and post the 10th grade; he was sent to Kota to pursue IIT. No sooner, he realized that Kota was only meant for learning to code, and yet again, he felt that he should do something different.
He joined Bansal Tutorials and traveled a lot in his spare time. And this traveling led to the beginning of a hospitality career. One day, finally, he realized that nothing was left for him in Kota and so he shifted to Delhi.
He started preparing for the SAT to study in the US, but this never happened as he thought of starting a new venture Oravel.
How did Oravel Stays come to existence?
His love for traveling made him travel to different parts of the country. Being from a Marwari family, he says his father always wanted him to work with him, but he always avoided it.
He traveled across the northern part just to explore the hills in his free time while he was in Kota. He traveled through Volvo buses, did internships with various companies just for the sake of traveling. He always wanted to bring some sort of the change in the hotel business, and for that, he stayed at many hotels and rented houses for free.
He said that he faced a hard time convincing the hotel owners to let him stay for free. He also added that the hospitality sector faced a problem where affordable and clean rooms were not available for people traveling across the country, and another cherry on the top was no breakfast facility being available by all the rest houses. Traveled a lot for this purpose, and as he says, he had this hunger for solving the problem of this sector, which led him to start with his new venture Oravel.
Oravel came up to solve the problem of people who, while traveling, lookout for an easy and affordable place to stay, which provides the basics of bed and breakfast at the same place.
But, this unique idea of Ritesh failed as he was not able to aggregate the aids to run this venture. But this failure was also a step towards the success of Oyo.
Oyo Rooms Success Story:
Oravel came into existence in the year 2012. Ritesh tried to gather his funds through Venture Nursery, an accelerator firm that brought all the investors together to invest in startups. Later, he also won the Theil Fellowship, which was a contest as conducted for students under 20.
This very contest was started by Peter Theil, the founder of Pay Pal and one of the investors of Facebook. He won 2.7 lakhs/ month under this fellowship and along with guidance and tutorials to start a new venture. But, despite all the funds and efforts which were put forth for Oravel, they were proving void.
Ritesh thought hard and brought up a new idea to provide for an easy, affordable, and clean place to stay. He developed yet another model and transformed Oravel to Oyo. Where he developed an online community that could provide for clean day rentals at low, affordable prices.
