At fourteen, Vijay Shekhar Sharma finished Class 12. At fifteen, before he had turned sixteen, he joined Delhi College of Engineering as the youngest in his batch, a boy from a Hindi-medium school in Harduaganj, near Aligarh, who could barely follow what his professors were asking. He has said he "was cast out by people who were super smart". The class topper became a backbencher.
He was the third of four children. His father was a schoolteacher, his mother a housewife, and the family lived what he has called "a normal life, under abnormal financial constraints." His mother told him to prepare hard for the engineering entrance tests, because the family could not afford a private engineering college. So he studied alone for a year, reading two books on the same subject at once, one in Hindi and one in English. When he met "momentum" in English, he looked up its Hindi word, "samveg". He chose to sit the exam in English, the language that was now his biggest weakness.
He has said that in that period he figured few people would have noticed if the company had folded.
In Delhi he taught himself. He wrote down every word he did not know from newspapers, then magazines, and bought used copies of Fortune at Sunday book markets in Daryaganj. Reading about Silicon Valley gave him hope that someone like him could build something without finishing a degree. While still in college he started a company, XS Corps, whose business card gave a hostel room as the address. A nearby shopkeeper took messages on his phone. At job interviews he would announce that he was not there for the job but had a company that could do it for them. The website indiasite.net, started in college, sold about two years later for US$1 million.
Paytm itself began in August 2010 as a mobile recharge and bill-payment business, inside One97 Communications, a company incorporated on 22 December 2000. By 2009 One97 was already generating free cash every month, and an IPO planned for November 2010 was shelved at the last moment. When the Paytm wallet idea reached the board, Elevation Capital has said, members asked whether Indians would ever leave cash, and whether a team built for business clients could make consumer tech. The hardest stretch, he has said, was not the later regulatory crisis but the fundraising of 2013-14, when deals stalled and investors backed out at the last minute. He has said that in that period he figured few people would have noticed if the company had folded.
Then the money came: Alibaba and Ant in 2015, SoftBank's $1.4 billion in 2017, Berkshire Hathaway in 2018. The wallet in 2014 and QR payments in 2016, just as demonetisation pushed millions to digital payments, made Paytm a household name.
The fall was public. The November 2021 IPO raised ₹18,300 crore, then closed 27% down on day one. The Reserve Bank barred Paytm Payments Bank from onboarding in 2022, ordered most activity to stop in January 2024, and cancelled its licence in April 2026. He has said the action took a serious emotional and personal toll and admitted "we should have done better". The company posted a FY24 net loss of ₹1,423 crore.
A founder can take this from him: the English he lacked at sixteen, the money his family lacked, the investors who walked away at the last moment. None of it was a reason to stop. But a licence you do not control can take away in a day what a decade built.