Ritesh Agarwal, who is the founder of the successful venture OYO Rooms, started his career by selling SIM cards at a young age, only to become a millionaire at the age of 22.
India has seen many successful entrepreneurs in the past who have made it big with billion-dollar ideas and passion for their projects. Another such entrepreneur is Ritesh Agarwal, the founder, and CEO of the multi-billion dollar company OYO Rooms.
Ritesh Agarwal heads the company OYO Rooms, which has now gone beyond India and is setting up affordable hotels in other countries. OYO is a venture started by Agarwal to provide affordable hotel rooms across the country, a company that has been modeled after the American venture Airbnb.
While Ritesh Agarwal has a net worth of billions now, the road to success was not always easy for him, and he faced a lot of obstacles while achieving his dream of being an entrepreneur and making OYO Rooms a successful venture.
Ritesh Agarwal comes from Bissamcuttack, a small town south of Odisha, which is considered to be dominated by a major Naxal population. Agarwal decided to pursue higher education after school but soon dropped out of college at the young age of 19, with a dream to become a young entrepreneur.
Being a college dropout qualified him for the Peter Thiel fellowship, which made him get a grant of USD 100,000, which comes out to around Rs 80 lakhs. Thus, he ended up founding the company OYO Rooms just at the young age of 19.
He was motivated to create OYO Rooms after he was motivated to control the TV remote in his room, which was not possible when he was staying with his relatives. After dropping out from college, his living conditions were not good and hence, he started selling SIM cards since he was afraid of his parents finding out his accommodation conditions.
Now, Ritesh Agarwal has a team of thousands of employees that from IIT and IIMs, and was one of the youngest millionaires in India, crossing a net worth of a million at the age of just 22. Currently, Agarwal is 29 years old, and is net worth is around USD 1.1 billion, which comes out to Rs 9092 crore.
Meanwhile, OYO Rooms, which started with funding of just a few lakhs of rupees, now has a market cap of over USD 9.6 billion, which is around Rs 79,360 crore.
READ | Meet Ritesh Agarwal, OYO CEO who used to sell SIM cards, his current net worth is...
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 "This college dropout used to sell SIM cards, became millionaire at 22; now runs Rs 80,000 crore company")
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