At one low point in Delhi, Ritesh Agarwal had Rs 35 in his bank account. Open magazine reported that he was sleeping on the stairs of a rented barsati because he had not paid the rent on time.
He had come a long way from Bissamcuttack, a small town in Odisha's Rayagada district, where he grew up in a middle-class Marwari family. He was writing code as a boy. He once wanted to be an aircraft pilot, until his elder sister came back from an entrepreneurship festival and mentioned the word "entrepreneur". He looked it up in a dictionary, and from then on that was his answer when teachers asked what he wanted to be. By 13, according to a book excerpt, he was selling SIM cards and FMCG products.
After Class XII he enrolled at a Delhi college and dropped out three days later.
After Class X his parents sent him to Kota to prepare for IIT. He got bored. He started travelling to Delhi for entrepreneurship events, and when he could not afford the registration, he sometimes sneaked in. His Kota coaching school was lax about attendance, so he worked for entrepreneurs in Delhi and returned only for exams. His parents did not know for a long time. He still scored well enough to keep them reassured.
After Class XII he enrolled at a Delhi college and dropped out three days later. Convincing his parents was hard. He pitched it as a gap year, like students who take a year off to prepare for competitive exams, and promised to go back to college if the venture failed. He has described a childhood in which, as he told Open, his parents "usually decided what to wear, what to do".
His first company, Oravel, began with about Rs 16,000. It listed budget stays, but bookings were few and almost nobody came back. Customers were unhappy. So he spent three to four months sleeping in more than a hundred bed-and-breakfasts, guest houses and small hotels to find out why. What he found was not a shortage of rooms but unpredictability. In 2013 he became, at 19, the first Indian Thiel Fellow, with $100,000 behind him, and OYO started with one hotel in Gurgaon. He often worked as housekeeping staff himself to hold the standard.
Growth came fast and so did the damage. A former co-founder, Manish Sinha, accused him of a lack of transparency. A fight with Zostel over a 2015 term sheet ran until the Delhi High Court ruled in 2022. FY20 brought a loss of about Rs 13,122 crore, and the valuation slid from $10 billion to about $2.5 billion by June 2024. In FY25 the company reported revenue of Rs 6,253 crore and a profit of Rs 245 crore, and its parent PRISM won SEBI approval in June 2026 for a Rs 6,650 crore issue.
There is a line from that early Open profile worth keeping. Agarwal admitted he sometimes wonders whether he would hire himself, and that his answer is no. His first product only improved after he went and stayed in a hundred of the hotels himself, which is a harder way to learn than a spreadsheet and a more reliable one.