OYO-From a Startup to a Global Hotel Chain

In early 2000s, Ritesh Agarwal (Agarwal), a teenager, started selling SIM cards for pocket money in the small town of Rayagada in the eastern Indian state of Odisha. Like his elder engineer siblings, Agarwal was an IIT aspirant and he enrolled at Bansal Tutorials in Kota, Rajasthan, in 2009, to prepare for the IIT entrance examination. While at Kota, Agarwal often made weekend trips to Delhi by train and attended entrepreneurial conclaves held there. In Delhi, he was fascinated by entrepreneurs like Rahul Bhatia, Co-founder and Non-Executive Director of IndiGo Airlines, Siddhartha Lal (son of Vikram Lal), CEO at Eicher Motors, and many others and the range of consumer products their companies offered. Coming across these entrepreneurs woke up the entrepreneurial instincts in Agarwal and he aspired to come up with his own brand of product some day....