From a college drop out who has took the hotel industry by a storm,to a 20 year old CEO of more than one company, these youngsters had a vision in their head and determination in their heart. Although some of these founders started their success journey at a very tender age, they’ve shaken up the status-quo and have become CEOs before 40. Here’s a list of surprisingly these young and highly-successful CEOs worth drawing inspiration from-
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Ritesh Agarwal – CEO, Oyo Rooms
Ritesh started his journey working on OravelStays at a young age of around 18 years in Cuttack.When he was starting off, he didn’treally have a place to stay would negotiate with friends and landlords for living arrangements. He decided to keep his venture a secret from his parents. When he first started off, the hotels he was working with all echoed the same thing – “Make money for my hotel and I’ll pay you”. He worked hard and finally brought customers through the door, and increased the hotel’s occupancy through the week. He then had a desire to create standardized and hygienic rooms for frequent travelers, and thus sprang Oyo rooms a year later. His vision, with which he led a team of 100, has now doubled and Oyo rooms is one of the most sought-after in the hotel-booking industry. He’s now the CEO at one of the fastest growing startups India has ever seen.
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Ritik Malhotra – CEO, Streem
In 2012, Ritik developed Streem, which was a faster way to stream files over cloud databases – a revolutionary technology system at that time. Nobody was paying attention to this young lad, until he started his own company and got acquired by the company Box, where he continued to work on the platform he built. He’s now an angel investor and a staunch supporter of young entrepreneurs in the US, who want to develop new integrated platforms.
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Varun Agarwal – CEO, Alma Mater
Alma Mater started off with a simple idea. There are college campus communities in the US that represent their college through their clothing. Whether it’s a Letterman jacket or a simple T-shirt with the name of the college, Alma Mater has many of India’s colleges in its system and it allows for anyone to purchase some from their website. Varun later went on to write a book about his experiences and called it “How I Braved Anu Aunty and Co-Founded a Million Dollar Company” in 2012. In the book, he highlights the challenges he faced with things like “societal-pressure”, “lack of support”, etc. and he gives more details about his journey through this promotional video–
Video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L61JqGGiSZw
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Ayaan Chawla – CEO,( multiple companies)
Ayaan is one of India’s youngest CEOs, having started his first company at the age of 14, and even received a letter of appreciation from the PM of India a few years ago. According to his website, Ayaan was a self-learner and picked up applications / computer programming languages himself and began coding websites & apps at the age of 13 in 2010. A year later he founded “Group For Buddies”, and in 2011 he founded an IT company called ‘Asian Fox Developments’. In 2013 he founded a company for web solutions called “Global Web Mount”, and another company for Media & Marketing services called “Mind-In Advertising”.
