RITESH AGARWAL
Ritesh Agarwal is an Indian entrepreneur and OYO rooms founder, which provides good hotel rooms to travelers at affordable prices through its online website www.oyorooms.com. 29 year old Ritesh Agarwal has also been awarded with many awards for his oyo rooms company and for his successful business. At the age of 21, people are either in college or looking for a job, but Ritesh Agarwal has proved that startups have no age by setting up a company with an annual turnover of 360 crores. Ritesh Agarwal also wrote a book at the age of 16. Whose name is Indian Engineering Collages: A complete Encyclopedia of Top 100 Engineering Collages, this book sold a lot on Flipkart and this book was also appreciated. Today, in the eyes of people, Ritesh Agarwal’s image is as a successful entrepreneur who inspires other youths to be successful, so let’s take a look at Ritesh’s journey of struggle and ups and downs.
Ritesh Agarwal Background
Ritesh Agarwal was born on 16 November 1993 in Cuttack, Orissa in a Marwari middle-class family. Talking about his background, his family was already in business. His father works in an infrastructure corporation and his mother is a homemaker. And they are three siblings. Due to being a businessman family since childhood, Ritesh had a glimpse of doing that business from childhood itself, this is proved by the fact that when he was just 16 years old, he completed Indian Engineering Collages: A complete Encyclopedia of Top 100 Engineering Wrote a book named Collages as it is known from the name of this book that 100 engineering colleges of India have been mentioned in it, this book was sold online on Flipkart. Ritesh is very fond of traveling and this hobby has taken him from floor to floor. He believes that he was inspired by Bill Gattes, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook. Due to which the spirit of doing something was born in him and in just 21 years he made OYO Rooms a company worth 360 crores.
Ritesh Agarwal Education
Ritesh Agarwal studied till intermediate from the cared Heart School of his district, and for further studies he went to Kota city of Rajasthan where he got admission in IIT. And this is where he wrote his book as well. He was lucky and was a man of passing thinking, so at the age of just 16, he was selected for the Asian Science Camp, organized at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIRF) in Mumbai. Where students from all over Asia are selected and discussed and find ideas to solve social problems, from where they got to learn a lot, after that they joined the Indian school of business and finance in Delhi, but their oravel project Due to being busy, he had to leave his studies.
Where did the business idea come from
Now, be it Delhi, Mumbai or Kota, whenever Ritesh used to go for a vacation in the summer of winters, he used to stay in the hotel, he used to feel a lot of inconvenience there and at that time booking was done directly from the hotel. There was no special company like oyo rooms so they used to notice that sometimes they get good rooms in low price. And even after paying a lot of money, poor quality rooms, now business has been running in his veins since childhood, so he was also thinking of doing business. But till now he could not decide that if he does business, what should he do? From where people can easily get their hotel rooms booked online. And just from this started his Business Model which he named Oravel.
Oravel
In the year 2012, when he came up with this idea of getting online room booking, he named it Oravel and started working. Fund of lakh was also received. And now he had every facility to move the company forward. When his business went a little better, he put his business model in a global competition organized by PayPal’s co-founder Peter Thel’s “Thel Foundation” in which Ritesh Agarwal got number 10 and became the first Indian to get a place in Theil Fellowship and also a fund of Rs 66 lakhs. Now his condition had become better but after a few days his business was going into loss day by day, maybe it was because he was giving the facility to the passengers to book the room online but how the passenger is getting that room. According to Panso, whether he could get it or not, they were not looking and this company went into a lot of loss. Due to which it had to be closed and now it was the turn of their successful OYO rooms.
OYO RoomS
Ritesh did not lose his courage when oravel was closed in loss and what could be the reason that it had to be closed, he looked closely at it and found the same reason that they were providing booking facility. But the passengers did not pay attention, then they thought to launch oravel again, but oravel had become such a brand that due to inconvenience, the earlier passengers did not want to come again. So Ritesh introduced the same business model in a new form by the name of OYO rooms and this time he formed a team of 5 members whose job was to check the hotel rooms while tying up with the hotel whether they are clean or not. No. If they meet the rules of OYO, then only the hotels are tied up with OYO, otherwise not, and due to their improvement, their company has already reached tremendous stardom. Whose annual turnover is around 400 crores.
In 2014 itself, two big companies Lightspeed Venture Partners (LSVP) and DSG Consumer Partners invested Rs 4 crore in Oyo Rooms. In the current year 2016, Japan’s multinational company Softbank has also invested 7 billion rupees. With which Ritesh can get his business to achieve new heights.
Ritesh has become such a successful entrepreneur at the young age of 26 (2017). Who has tied up with 6500 hotels in 182 cities of India, for which today around 1500 employees work in his company OYO room.
