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Shyam Kumar

Startup as a dream • 21d

How did an 18-year-old do what billionaires couldn’t even do in 100 years? He had no IIT tag. No godfather in business. Just relentless curiosity and courage to solve a real-world problem. This is the story of OYO founder Ritesh Agarwal. Born in Odisha, he was fascinated with computers since Class 4. When others were preparing for engineering and medical, he was reading entrepreneurship books and looking at business models around him. But he achieved one thing that matters: value creation. He stayed in over 200 budget hotels across India – not as a tourist, but as a learner. He saw a broken system: dirty rooms, no consistency, zero trust. Also, many homes and small hotels had excess capacity lying idle. So he built The Bridge: Clean, affordable, standardized rooms across India. No asset ownership. Just branding + tech + process. At 19, he became the first Asian to win the Thiel Fellowship ($100K funding). At 25, he built one of the world's largest hotel chains.

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