Pulkit Sharma || The CEO Magazine
The success journey of Ritesh Agarwal from a dropout to a billionaire is quite inspirational. Ritesh Agarwal a 25-year-old billionaire from India is the founder and CEO of the world's most affordable hotel chain, OYO. He started his journey at the age of 20 with a vision of creating a solution for people looking for affordable hotels around the globe and he is on the path of success to achieve his goal.
Ritesh was a tech freak from a very young age as he started coding when he was just 10 years old. Another of his passion was to travel around the world. While he travels across India, he realizes that there is a need for affordable hotels which provides decent services in India. The affordable hotels do not provide necessary services such as AC, Wi-Fi, comfortable beds and breakfast facilities.
This gave him a hunch to do something to solve this problem so he combined his love for travel with his obsession with technology to make something useful. It was difficult for him at the beginning as he does not know anything about entrepreneurship but as he developed his plan and showed it to some investors he received a funding of $100,000 which helped him to kick start his entrepreneurial journey.
Entrepreneurship is not a destination, its journey where one has to keep on learning and improving their knowledge and skill set. Ritesh started his journey by launching Oravel Stays, which helped people to locate and book affordable hotels near them. This directory of affordable hotels was helping travellers to find pocket-friendly hotels but it was not serving the purpose for which Ritesh started this company.
Soon he realizes that to solve this problem he needs to have an in-depth research about the hospitality services so he began to travel across India and visited almost hundreds of hotels. After all this, he found that the major problems in the hospitality industry are their non-standard services and unpredictability so he decided to solve these problems with the help of OYO.
Many people don't know that "OYO stands for On Your Own". Ritesh then updated his old business model and converted it into a much better one which is now known to everyone as OYO hotels. They start providing affordable rooms with standard facilities in more than 1000 hotels across India and OYO doesn't own any of those hotels. This concept made Ritesh Agarwal a billionaire at the age of 23.
Find a major problem and think about how you can solve it
Value your knowledge
Keep on learning about your favourite field and became an expert in it.
Ability to accept your mistakes and improving future
Hard work and patience is really important to succeed
Ritesh Agarwal is a true inspirational story for every Indian boy who wants to achieve something great in her/his life. His unique thinking and ability to solve problems made him the youngest billionaire in India
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