Entrepreneur Speak | Ritesh Agarwal - Oyo Rooms Co-founder On Entrepreneurship | upGrad

I think, for me, it was Tred fresh out of high school during that period. I had the opportunity to do some sort of internship at a lot of younger startups. I think in that period I learned how young businesses can be transformative and have a significant impact on you know the people around you and what you create, so I wanted to do that at a time when I was traveling a lot to the hill stations around from Delhi so you know I spent my childhood in a place that was very coastal and had a lot of beaches and I had never seen Hills so for me seeing Hills was the most important thing so I would take a lot of these lower budget properties , unbranded, in many of these areas after staying in several of them.

We realized that there is so much supply available on one side, while on the other side you have a lot of consumers who want you to know the right experience, the right price, etc., and so on, and our belief was that we will simply bring them together at both, so I think the belief of saying that a country that has 450,000 travelers, which is 150,000 more than the population of the states, cannot live in a country where the largest hotel chain only had 7 or 8,000

rooms

and I felt that There was a deeper need to have a brand network where consumers can say we had a great experience, it's available everywhere and at the right price, so that's how the idea became a reality for every

entrepreneur

, including you. yourself and almost everyone, is when you decide that this is something that has a big impact when creating an idea, you just become Restless, you can't, you can't stop before you want to start, you just can't stop before.

You get your first deal or the first process starts because you're restless, right? You can imagine what it's going to be like and it just doesn't feel right if that doesn't happen in reality, so I think that's when, eh. right after high school uh Against All Odds because people would say you know guys I mean you just got out of high school like you could spend a couple of years doing a bunch of other things uh but I think I think that because I was restless and couldn't stop before I could see that impact. I jumped into band B to start starting the company pretty early, so I think very early.

Every

entrepreneur

starts doing everything right, so you start. So I was. I was the guy who was the cleaner, the engineer, the salesman and everything in the business. What I realized over time is that you can't create everything yourself correctly, like you're not the person you are, while your reference points are really high. meaning you always think you're the guy who can do it best, but you know one thing you learn sooner rather than later is the most important thing you do when building a great company: build a great team around you, I think the The reason oo has been comparatively successful over the last year and a half of our existence is because we have recruited arguably the smartest talent this country has ever seen in a startup, perhaps equivalent to ranking. of the best startups in this country, I think it is difficult for two main reasons: one reason, being you, as an entrepreneur, your reference point is very high and the second is to attract other people and give them the ownership of doing things and Making decisions is generally difficult because it's something you care deeply about from every kind of execution standpoint, but I think over time what I learned was that greater ownership with stronger skill sets is kind of the core of driving the business.

The first person I brought on was the guy who brought us the hotels, which was the supply side. I think what I learned was that I was really good at cleaning the hotel, making sure I got the right product and selling to these two users, but I realized that getting more hotels was really difficult because I didn't understand how the process is run, so the first guy who joined us was Anuj, uh, in a core team that now runs the supply for us nationally over time. that as we added more hotels to be able to control the experience at each hotel, we needed the skill set of a large-scale operations guy, so we hired the second guy, our CEO, who arguably ran the largest factory for one of the bigger. consumer goods company in India, he went to HBS, he used to be a director at BCG before he came back to India and started operating for us, so he had the analytical vision of a young startup that will have extremely efficient processes but also had the ability to build a great team with Marshall alongside him to ensure the quality of the experiences are right in every way, throughout the experience.

I think as these hires occurred, I could see exponential value creation. of having people like this and after which I spent, I've spent most of my time just recruiting some very high quality people and that continues to help us grow at the pace that we're moving at, I think very early. so I just took two steps back when I felt I needed to enable an online marketplace where people can come and book accommodation. I started and you know, online was the word that started right, so you wanted to make sure it was available. for users to book so I started building the web product when I started building it I realized that it requires a lot more detail than you would expect before you start building it so one of the questions that came up for me.

What literally changed the way I thought was what the departure time is. I hadn't stayed in many hotels and didn't know what the standard check-out time was until then and I felt like I had to create I'm a thought leader in the space and I don't know what the standard check-in time is. Am I building the right business? So I think that was the moment when I felt that to solve the problem it is extremely important to feel the pain and the big companies. globally have been created by entrepreneurs who had a personal problem that was then solved on a broader scale, so I think for a couple of months, um, I had had some savings for a year and a half because I had been involved in a Many younger companies, because of which I took and literally woke up every day and stayed in a new guest house with breakfast room service department etc. for a period of 4-5 months.

I think during that 4 to 5 month period. We continued to build and launch various versions of our website, which is where a couple of users due to referrals started booking with us during this period, what we realized was that most of these users were coming back to us saying, how can we have a more predictable standardized experience because sometimes we have a really good experience and sometimes we have a really bad experience, how can we make sure that the bad ones can be slowly removed from the experience so that we can use it again and again? This is where I felt like the first advantage or requirement was to make sure that we standardize our experience and make sure that we maintain it consistently over and over again.

The owner of the hotel was making a lot of money and a lot of other hotels wanted to partner with us, so he wanted to make sure that someone can come and bring us more hotels so you know, um uh, we had a person that we wanted to make sure could interact with the users who wanted to have instructions who wanted to make sure that if they had any problems, to the room, they could call us, they could call us for support and all that stuff, but effectively, what I thought is that I will be very successful if I keep replacing myself, If I replace myself every day, I will bring in extremely smart people so that I can focus on the next five big things until I continue doing the things that are required today.

I will never start creating value for what needs to be created tomorrow, so I guess that's the way I thought about what they are. a lot of things that I needed to create value for, so I think one of the things that I've deeply believed in is saying that you should always work to replace yourself because if you replace yourself you may be thinking about the next big things instead to do what is required today, so as we recruit people, I always think what are the four things that are eating up my bandwidth every day and let's recruit four amazing people who can do those four things better than me to that I can dedicate time to the following five important things that the company needs because as a young company, there is so much to do every day that you need to make sure that you spend your time only on the important items and everything else. recruit people who are smarter than you, who are specialists or generalists, to do that, four four people, one person to bring more hotels, one person to ensure the consistency of the quality of the experience, one person to ensure that the product move in the right direction and one person to ensure the engineering was working well.

I was a salesperson and I think the financial design etc. were all external support so I think the demand was something that you know, one of the things we have believed in as a company is as a Leader, you always need to do something that is equally or more important as a parallel on the board of directors that ensures that the people around you see that you are operationally involved in doing what is required in the company and that you continue to earn the respect of the people who work. uh, along with you, maybe over time you don't need to do all those things because you also have strategic value creation things, but I think at least at the entry level and mid level of the company it's important to make sure that everyone has ownership very, very large operational, so, so that they can, they can, everyone can work together, shoulder to shoulder.

I think one of the things that I, U uh uh, you know, I think four of them was Serendipity, was mainly In a way, you know, meeting people one after another through mutual connections, etc., but I think that, in four of these places, you know that this is the reality of a startup, if you ask the Mantra of recruiting great talents, there is no Mantra and for me specifically it was even more difficult. I didn't have an alumnus from my university. I didn't have potential colleagues that I had worked with and so one of the things I did was rank That said, you know what I'm going to do.

I'm going to put all my effort, time and aggression into executing it really well and a lot of people around me would be attracted to working together with me to create the value I'm trying to create, so the first guy wrote to me after finding out what I was doing for someone and he said, "Hey, I want to, I want to be part of the company," and I said, "Look at your background." He looks very skilled, like you. You went to this. You are doing a very good consulting job. I mean, I really like what I'm talking about, but I can't afford it.

He said it doesn't really matter, I just want to come. and work for you. I'm thinking about quitting my job, so if that makes sense to you, I'll quit. Actually, I think that was the first one. The second was a mutual friend who really really respected and liked what he was doing and Abav had just moved to India from Los Angeles and was thinking about potentially starting his company. That's when he told her: Hey, you're an entrepreneur and you're thinking about building a mass-market problem. I think if that's the case, there's a guy you should definitely meet and I went out with abinav and I think it was possibly the best four days I spent with a potential colleague I could work with.

I think, um uh, I think throughout this process Pro, I've basically said there's going to be a lot of ways, from a potential person connecting with recruiters to LinkedIn and a bunch of ways that I'm going to treat people, but I Think about this, there will be two things that will be extremely important for you to consider: the first is if that person buys and wants to make exactly what you want to create and if they see the same thing and the second is what happens is that person is willing to run it as your own company or instead of just being another executive because one more executive is not what a startup is, here you go, you know, I mean, if you want to build a company that is like Silicon Valley, which is very high quality, etc., you have to adopt the culture of the big, hard-working, strategic, but also very, very fast-moving companies of Silicon Valley and, therefore, you want to have talent that is equal to or better than them .

I think I think these were two things that I cared deeply about and I think they've been very helpful to us. I think as an organization, at the rate at which we grow every 6 months, it changes, so we, we. called something called organization uh uh 1.0 2.0 and now we're creating organization 3.0 the basic thing is to make sure it's flat uh it's difficult because you're an organization you're big but at the same time you have to keep it flat because the real reason why that you are growing and being so successful is because everyone works together tosolve the same common problem to build that with this flat structure, it is important to make sure that everyone As an organization is aligned with the Long Term Vision, once it is there, you can always continue to create formats and structures to allow that to be solved as part of creating structures.

One of the things we care deeply about is over-communication. As a larger organization, you always have the option to work properly in your silos, but it's important to make sure you keep that away. Do the hard thing to take your team with you and make them part of your company culture to be sure. That excess of communication is in the DNA of the company instead of just being another thing in the company, so I think it is something that has worried us deeply and that has been one of the reasons why, regardless of having hired um, you know. leadership execution people geographic heads uh uh mid-level people and all those things we still have a perfectly functioning organization in the way of making sure that the people at the entry level can work with the CEO but at the same time uh yeah the majority Most of the time, we spend time creating long-term strategic and large-scale value, so I think it's difficult in general, but it's important to achieve if over-communication is the solution and you have great leaders in the company where a people like the rates and with the, of course, the ability to make decisions like the one that I exist in each geography and the process, I think it becomes much easier.

I think mainly it's been entering a completely different scenario, right, I think going from one hotel to 40. hotels was for the first time that we started having multiple hotels, so the organization had to be a little different from going from one city ​​to 20 cities was multi-geographic, so it was important to have geographic teams around it and with that geography changed. We discovered a lot of people oriented to the processes that we wanted to have when that happened, we realized that 30 to 1170 geographies will need massive scale for that scale to reach, you need to create a large technology team, as it reached 117 geographies in a significant level. scale iCal and you saw that you had problems like those of the uh Six Sigma process, the long-term ability to guarantee unit economics.

I think that's when we started bringing in people who are very strategic in nature and can take a lot of time. -Long-term problems and, in a way, moving forward for the next two or three years, so I think most of the time it has been changes in stage for the company that have been symptoms for us to fully incorporate an organization different. to create value because one thing we believe is that if you're trying to create possibly the largest hotel network in the world here from India in oo it's like the people that we have around us are never enough to believe that you will always need more people more smart people around you, those people will come and pull you in various directions, maybe some of them will be good for you and some of them will be frictional, but net net Both of those things will lead them to potentially becoming the largest hotel network in the world, which It represents a lot of possible solutions to problems and impacts that you solve yourself and that's what we're all here for, right?

I think keeping that focus in mind allows us to always keep thinking about broadening our vision around the type of people we want to attract, so we were operating in Gu uh uh based in NCR before this, so When we feel that a lot of consumers here are Having a great experience and everyone wants us to have a hotel in Bangalore, we felt it makes a lot of sense to have a couple of hotels there, so we went to Bangalore. We felt that we would recruit someone there to potentially create u u and manage the hotels there and we saw that when you operate in multiple geographies every day you need to make a different decision, from saying Bangalore, your signage should have a conard uh uh language along with the name to saying that the size of the properties is different, the ability to standardize them is different, the suppliers are different, etc.

Because of the challenges we saw in that city, I felt that if I continue to solve what is happening in Bengaluru, I will never be able to launch Mumbai because all the cities we operate in and some of the Matrix will be similar, but there are many other decisions that will be incremental. , but those are going to come every day and you want to make sure you have leaders similar to your ability to make small decisions in those places to make sure you can launch a lot of bigger cities at the same time, which is when we start.

We started looking for someone who could come and run Bangalore for us and after that it became a trend that before launching the city we used to hire the head of that city to ensure that they were culturally inclined towards us working in the head offices for for a while and then they go to the city and continue operating from there. I think of course every journey is different in terms of the value creation they're going to do, every product/business is completely different idea, but one thing that remains consistent in terms of the background of what we just talked about is that it is extremely important to create the right people around you in the company if you have the right people around you who are willing to solve a problem and we are going to work together to do it, even if that product or that website or that business does not it works, you can do anything, so the reality is you know, I mean, no, you don't respect the idea. or the website or the product, I mean of course the product is extremely important, the ideas are important, the website is very important, but the most important thing is the team that you create around you, if you do it very well , everything else falls. online