How Paytm CEO Went From Being ‘Ineligible’ Bachelor to Billionaire
At 27, Vijay Shekhar Sharma used to be making Rs. 10,000 a month, a modest wage that didn’t assist his marriage possibilities.
“In 2004-05, my father requested me to close my corporate and soak up a task although it used to be for 30,000 rupees,” Sharma, who went directly to discovered virtual bills company Paytm in 2010, advised Reuters.
On the time, the educated engineer bought cellular content material by way of a small corporate.
“Households of potential brides would by no means name us again after studying that I earn round 10,000 rupees a month,” Sharma stated. “I had transform an ineligible bachelor for my circle of relatives.”
Closing week, the 43-year-old Sharma led Paytm’s $2.five billion (kind of Rs. 18,515 crore) preliminary public providing (IPO). The fintech company has transform the toast of a brand new India, the place the first-generation of the rustic’s startups are making stellar inventory marketplace debuts and minting new millionaires.
Born to a faculty instructor father and a house maker mom in a small town in India’s maximum populous Uttar Pradesh state, Sharma, who become India’s youngest billionaire in 2017, nonetheless loves having tea at a roadside cart and steadily takes brief morning walks to shop for milk and bread.
“For a very long time my oldsters had no thought what their son used to be doing,” Sharma stated of the time China’s Ant Team first invested in Paytm in 2015. “As soon as my mom examine my internet value in a Hindi newspaper and requested me, ‘Vijay do you in reality have the type of cash they are saying you might have?'”
Forbes places Sharma’s internet value at $2.four billion (kind of Rs. 17,775 crore).
“What are my odds?”
Paytm started simply over a decade in the past as a cellular recharge corporate and grew temporarily after ride-hailing company Uber indexed it as a snappy fee possibility in India. Its use leapfrogged in 2016 when India’s surprise ban on high-value forex notes boosted virtual bills.
Paytm, which additionally counts SoftBank and Berkshire Hathaway as its backers, has since branched out into products and services together with insurance coverage and gold gross sales, film and flight ticketing, and financial institution deposits and remittances.
Whilst Paytm pioneered virtual bills in India, the distance quickly become crowded as Google, Amazon, WhatsApp, and Walmart’s PhonePe introduced fee products and services to grasp a slice of a marketplace anticipated to develop to greater than $95.29 trillion (kind of Rs. 70,57,41,560 crore) by way of the top of March 2025, in step with EY.
That push by way of world giants gave Sharma an extraordinary second of doubt, which he raised with SoftBank’s wealthy person billionaire founder Masayoshi Son.
“I referred to as up Masa and stated – now everybody’s right here, what do you suppose are my odds?”
Son, an early investor in Yahoo! and Alibaba, advised Sharma to “elevate more cash, double down and move all in” and focal point all his power on development bills, not like opponents which had different number one companies.
Sharma, who’s married and has a son, stated he hasn’t ever appeared subsidized since.
Whilst some marketplace analysts have issues over when Paytm will flip successful, Sharma is assured of his corporate’s luck.
In 2017, Paytm introduced a invoice bills app in Canada and a yr later entered Japan with a cellular pockets.
“My dream is to take the Paytm flag to San Francisco, New York, London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. And when other folks see it they are saying – you understand what, that is an Indian corporate,” Sharma stated.
© Thomson Reuters 2021
