By Juliana Pasker
A college dropout, who once needed to sit for a engineering exam, Ritesh today heads among the most important start-up by a man who never studied past school.
Agarwal comes from Bissamcuttack, a small town south of Odisha, a region known to teem with Naxalite activity.
He even sold sim cards to survive; perplexed his well off family would end his entrepreneurial dreams and summon him back home to Odisha in the event that they was aware of his battles. He did enroll for the University of London’s International Programme provided by the Indian School of Business and Finance, Delhi – “to keep my parents happy.” But most of his time went into attending entrepreneurship events and traveling to research his business idea.
His education came from something else: the Thiel fellowship for under-20 entrepreneurs. It was started by PayPal founder Peter Thiel for young businesspeople.
Ritesh started his entrepreneurial journey when he was 17 years old. He dropped out of college and launched his first start‐up Oravel Stays Pvt. Ltd. in the year 2012. Oravel was designed as a platform to enable listing and booking of budget accommodation. Being an avid traveler, he soon realized that the budget hospitality sector lacked predictability. Therefore, he pivoted Oravel to OYO Rooms in 2013 with the key proposition of offering affordable and standardized accommodation.
Ritesh Agarwal is one of the youngest millionaire from India’s blasting startup group. He is the founder and CEO of OYO(On Your Own) Rooms, a system of budget hotels and accomodation alternatives. OYO rooms is the nation’s biggest budget hotel network with around 50,000 rooms in 500 inns all over India. Oyo doesn’t possess hotels, rather, it ties up with specific hotels and gets a few rooms to be offered out to individuals who need to benefit OYO administrations. It focuses on standardizing the hotels in the non-branded hospitality sector. Oyo rooms is an extremely effective venture as it has figured out how to unravel the issue of reasonableness, cleanliness and accessibility of budget hotels over all Level I and Level II cities in the nation.
Apart from an entrepreneur, he is an author, a coder and a great orator. At a young age, his book- A complete Encyclopaedia of top 100 engineering colleges, was published and soon became a best seller. Agarwal started coding at the tender age of 8 and at the age of 16, he got a chance to be one of the 240 students who were a part of an Asian camp held at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He was the youngest speaker in the panel of Think EDU panel,2014 and is a constant at VCCircle events.
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