Bhavish Aggarwal's first company did not sell a single trip. Olatrip.com, the travel-planning site he started with his IIT Bombay batchmate Ankit Bhati in December 2010, began with about Rs 2 lakh in the bank. Outlook Business later reported that it failed to sell a trip, which is why Ola became a cab business.
He grew up in Ludhiana in an upper-middle-class Punjabi home. Both parents are doctors, a father who is an orthopaedic surgeon and a mother who is a pathologist, according to a FactorDaily profile. He failed the IIT entrance exam the first time, then came back the next year with an all-India rank of 23. When he told his parents he wanted to start a travel company, a Business Insider India headline records their reply: "why don't you open a travel agency?" His father was puzzled that an IIT graduate wanted to run a travel business. Aggarwal reportedly told him not to worry, he would figure out a path.
Both parents are doctors, a father who is an orthopaedic surgeon and a mother who is a pathologist, according to a FactorDaily profile.
The story people tell about the pivot is a bad taxi ride. As told on India.com, a driver on a Bengaluru to Bandipur trip demanded more than the agreed fare and left him on the road after an argument. Accounts of that trip differ, and he is not recorded telling it here.
The first years were thin. He later described them as figuring out the next month's cheque, with a team of 10 to 20 people and few customers. In an early investor meeting in 2012, according to FactorDaily, he was stumped by a question about Ola's organisational structure and quickly looked the term up while the investor was distracted. His father was almost a co-founder, holding the same number of shares as his son before he stepped back.
Then Ola won, and winning got complicated. Uber's Travis Kalanick reportedly told Ola's investors in January 2016 that Uber would run Ola into the ground. Aggarwal reportedly turned down a larger SoftBank offer at a lower valuation, took less money, and amended the company's articles to limit investors' share transfers. Tiger Global's Lee Fixel left the board in 2017 after a dispute with him. FactorDaily counted more than a dozen senior leaders leaving in 36 months, though most of that picture comes from anonymous insiders, since Aggarwal declined to be interviewed. In 2020 Ankit Bhati left the company; the company denied any rift.
By April 2024 Ola had exited all international markets. FY23 revenue was Rs 2,799 crore against a net loss of Rs 772 crore.
Aggarwal has contrasted his parents' generation, focused on basic security, with his own: "There has to be one generation that does tapasya." The first idea went nowhere, and the second came from a real irritation. That order of events is more common in founder stories than the tidy version admits.