TL;DR: article claims Ritesh lied about his "bestseller book", lied about his "Asian Science Camp invite", lied his way into an incubator, lied his way into the "Thiel Fellowship" programme.
And screwed a bunch of people on his way up.
Confident, assertive and charismatic, he always manages to come on top. In other words, a successful modern start-up artist.
What he has done, is standardize the experience in a hotel based on which category it fits (standard, premium, deluxe) and ensure you'll get a certain minimum standard of experience on your stay in any "OYO Room" across India. This is a huge problem in India especially at the lower end (sub $100). Also, what he has been very smart about is that his app/website provides the only interface with the hotel so you have to book it through OYO Rooms only, unlike other websites where you usually just discover hotels and book directly by calling/mailing the hotel itself.
Yes, but this mainly holds true at the lower end of the pricing, starting from as low as INR 899 going upto a few thousand per day. He has managed to get such rates by aggregating a good number of guest houses which cost much less, which are otherwise out of the purview of typical hotel aggregators. The room detail page provides you a good description of what to expect in terms of feature list as well as realistic photographs, eliminating the "surprise" factor as much as possible. Instead of searching for a Hotel A/B/C when visiting a new city, you just book an "OYO Room" of your desired category in your desired location.
He succeeded because he solved a genuine problem. I have experienced the stay at the Hotels branded under OYO rooms. It is better in so many ways than other similar budget hotels.
Similar to how Best Western and Quality Inns started as cooperatives of existing hotels some 70-80 years ago. Of course they just had paper directories and no centralized booking at the time.
Clever way to bootstrap a franchise business. Nice work.
I've stayed in some really basic hotels in India. You get to choose between cheap and awful or expensive and decent. The bad places aren't always bad to keep costs low. Often the proprietors don't have the skills to run it any other way.
A lot of mom & pop businesses could benefit from this sort of approach.
I hung out with Ritesh for a while two years ago when we were both finalists for the Thiel Fellowship. I found him very impressive even back then, and he was just a really genuine and nice guy. I'm happy to hear he and OYO are doing so well!
In the UK, you pretty much gamble whether an independent hotel, b&b, or holiday cottage has decent mattresses. There is less of an issue of quality of service but you really cannot tell how good the beds are.
I love that he didn't reinvent the wheel, he found a crappy wheel and sold it's owner on how to make it better. He put a price tag on things we all do when we find a service that could be improved.
>A similar idea - which eventually evolved into Oyo Rooms - won him a coveted Thiel Fellowship - a programme sponsored by PayPal co-creator and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel - which pays for 20 teenagers each year to stop studying and try to set up a business instead.
Someone tell me there are safeguards in place, because this just sounds like an award for dropping out. I assume there have to be assurances from the school/college that they can return to their studies later if business doesn't take off?
It definitely isn't a lot... I can only think of 6 of the 60 fellows that have finished the program (Classes 2011 through 2013) that have gone back to school. Most if not successful get another job in the technology industry (or start another company). With the two new classes bringing it up to 100, I doubt there will be more than 20-25 that go back to school.
But yea, those that have chosen to go back to school have done much better than if they were to stay in school in the first place... Two of the 6 I was thinking of are now in PhD programs while they never finished undergrad.
How many successful companies have actually been started by a Thiel Fellow? The only one I can find is Oyo, but Ritesh had already dropped out of college to work on its predecessor (Oravel) long before he applied to the Thiel Fellowship (which he apparently lied his way into, according to the comment above by Radim, and this article: http://www.livemint.com/Companies/7CN7u5d4i3bfYgBAZLdLpM/Wil...).
It seems to me (admittedly an outsider) that Thiel learned the wrong lesson from Zuck's success with dropping out to found Facebook. It wasn't because Zuck dropped out of college that Facebook was successful - it was because Facebook was already successful (already seeing exponential growth) that Zuck dropped out. Thiel then took this incorrect lesson to encourage lots of other students from elite universities to also drop out, which has had predictably disappointing results.
Similarly, Ritesh wasn't successful because he dropped out and became a Thiel Fellow - he was accepted to the Thiel Fellowship because he had already dropped out and had seen some success (or lied that he had, as it seems).
> Most if not successful get another job in the technology industry
Getting a job is great, but that just means that Thiel's stamp of approval has been placed on the individual, instead of the college's. The upside being years/thousands of dollars in saved tuition, the downside being that Thiel is not commonly known outside of Silicon Valley circles. I'd rather take the degree any day.
While I wouldn't call mine a success (yet), I'm a 2013 Thiel Fellow and founder of REX Computing, a recently venture funded fabless semiconductor startup. While venture funding is not a measure of success, I would say we are progressing technically very well. There have been a couple of exits (Streem was acquired by Box) and others that are still moving along, but no unicorns.
I think you also misunderstand Thiel's motives for the fellowship... it is not saying that because Zuck was sucessful because he dropped out of college, Zuck was already lucky that he wasn't in debt. The student debt crisis has been getting worse and worse over the past decade, and Thiel's real core idea is that student debt is a huge barrier for young people to take risks (such as starting or joining a startup) during or after college.
For myself, I actually dropped out of high school to accept the fellowship. At that point I already had 3 years work experience at MIT, and was going to drop out of school anyways to accept a position at a large tech company in the Valley making three times the Fellowship's yearly grant. What the Fellowship offered me was the chance to do something very risky and being able to get into the game quickly with an advantage. I think it was the right choice for me.
> The student debt crisis has been getting worse and worse over the past decade, and Thiel's real core idea is that student debt is a huge barrier for young people to take risks (such as starting or joining a startup) during or after college.
I also recognize the debt issue, although I suspect that most of the Thiel Fellows would have little trouble getting full scholarships, as I did, or come from stable, upper middle class households with high-achieving parents who would be able and willing to cover the cost of tuition, as I also did. My point is that college dropouts or recent graduates (even from elite colleges) are not necessarily the best people to start successful high-growth ventures, regardless of whether they're in debt or not. Just because Zuck did it with Facebook (although from what you said, this didn't figure into Thiel's decision to start the Fellowship) doesn't mean that it makes sense to encourage high-achieving college students to drop out and start a business - and the results have borne that out (though perhaps your internal data says otherwise).
In essence:
1. By the time someone is an ideal high-growth startup founder, college debt should no longer be a big concern, either because they never had it in the first place or because they paid it off with the high-paying job they got after college.
2. Most of those who are suffering from high amounts of student debt are probably never going to be ready to found a high-growth startup that someone like Thiel would be interested in anyway.
The real solution to the student debt crisis is to optimize high school education such that it is sufficient for most jobs (or perhaps high school education, followed by part-time associate degree + co-op), and alter societal/employers' expectations to accept that a BS is overkill. Unfortunately, that is a very thorny sociopolitical issue that isn't easily solvable by throwing money at moonshot companies founded by smart young people, and it's this latter activity that Thiel has the most experience in.
Before a BS became table stakes for decent employment, you could rely on free, government-provided education to get you to a good job. Getting high-achieving students to drop out of elite colleges to start high-growth ventures is a fundamentally orthogonal matter to returning society to that norm.
hah, schools don't want students that eventually go into debt and then can't contribute back to the school or are barely getting by. They want (business) leaders and entrepreneurs who can convince people to back their ideas so that it might become a large business.
The Thiel fellowship debate certainly isn't new to this forum, but z very relevant aspect of that debate is how different the incentives look internationally.
My understanding is that in the US $100k over two years is equivalent to a comfortable middle class salary (outside SF, NY and perhaps one or two other places). It appears that in India it would be more like a exceptionally high salary placing someone in a top income bracket (except perhaps in Mumbai and one or two other places), an amount that would take several years to accumulate after getting a job at a prestigious multinational. The sort of sum someone with more modest expectations could even contemplate being a respectable retirement amount.
Keeping the amount equivalent internationally is perhaps only fair, especially since Thiel Fellows might look to relocate internationally to achieve their aspirations anyway, but it also means a sum proposed as a short term subsidy in the US represents actual wealth in some parts of the world.
A valid problem this.. I have been in Agra and was pissed off at how simple stuff didn't work.. there seemed to be seemingly simple solutions but the hotel owners/managers either didn't know or it seemed too hard...
Similar issues in the trip earlier in the year on a trip via Trivandrum in the southern State..
Depends what your standards are. I stayed in a place in Agra with no windows and unusual plumbing, but on the other hand it was $3 per night. Was particularly amusing when people staying in 5 star accommodation nearby came to check out the view from the rooftop restaurant.
Judging from the link, what OYO is doing well is identifying hotels which are in a mid-range price bracket by local standards which can justify that charge on account of service comparable to a Western budget hotel rather than on account of "deluxe" features that push the price up despite elements of the service, power supply or plumbing.
Not necessarily. Average wage in India is Rs 3000/mo (~$44) and you can get a perfectly decent single room at a guesthouse for under Rs 500 ($7) -- although at this price range the quality of the room will be a total crapshoot, which is precisely why this is such a great idea.
On the other hand, if you want a 100% guaranteed Western branded hotel experience, you'll pay through the nose for it. Back when I was working in Delhi, 4-star-ish hotels charged $400/night and up and the Trident Hilton in Gurgaon was $700.
I was confused at first but I believe he meant to say that the Oyo cut is approximately $3.5m per month and the article states that they get a fee from all bookings similar to a franchise fee, etc.
Out of 1500, I would say 1400 employees need to be paid around INR 10000 approx. This should equal about $200 per month per person. The rest would be better paid professionals like software programmmers, etc
A couple grand a month is more than sufficient pay in many parts of India. Heck, it's enough for new police officers in New York City (ok, I'm ignoring payroll tax and insurance for this one).
The average pay for hotel staff and call center operators is around Rs. 25,000 here, with junior pay starting at Rs. 15,000. That works out to less than $400 either way.
It's actually funny - BBC probably tried to convey a message that "age doesn't matter", but in tech circles this gets translated to "only a young person could achieve this".
