Ritesh Agarwal is the founder and CEO of OYO. He started his business career at 17, back-packing across the country, living in budget accommodations to eventually create the idea behind OYO. He is the first resident Asian to be awarded the Thiel Fellowship. In his free time, he loves cycling and practicing yoga.Ritesh Agarwal is the young founder and CEO of OYO Rooms, the fastest growing network of hotels, offline and online. The current evaluation of OYO Rooms is over $400 million. OYO Rooms does nothing out of the box but provides travelers the coolest yet cheapest budget hotels.Ritesh was born to a business family in Orissa and attended the Sacred Heart School in Raygada, Orissa. During the growing up days in Raygada, it was all about fun and learning for him. But Ritesh’s ways were rather unconventional from those of other kids.
His fun elements included screwing around with the computer, trying hard to find opportunities to make mistakes so that he could learn new stuff. As a result, he gained a keen interest in softwares. This started with the idea of knowing more about it and then the hunger just went on increasing. To quench his thirst to know more, he borrowed his elder brother’s books for programming. Some of the fun languages like Basic and Pascal were taught in school itself, and rest he managed to learn from Google. He had started coding when he was just eight years old. Hence, software had obviously become his first love. By the time he reached tenth grade, he had made up his mind and wanted to take up coding for eleventh.
Later in 2011, Ritesh moved to Delhi with strong intentions of starting up something of his own. At the same time, he also prepared for SAT to move to the States for further studies. But fortunately or unfortunately, SAT never happened. Thereafter he used to do nothing but read about entrepreneurs, startups, businesses and especially, Airbnb
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