I was 17, traveling across India, and every budget hotel was a gamble. Dirty sheets, broken AC, cockroaches. I thought, what if every cheap hotel room was actually clean and predictable? That question became OYO.
We don't own hotels. We don't build hotels. We make existing hotels not terrible. That's the entire business model, and it turns out there's a massive market for "not terrible."
At 19, I was the youngest Indian to receive the Thiel Fellowship. Peter Thiel paid me $100,000 to drop out of college. Best education I never got.
We were adding 64,000 rooms a month at our peak. People said it was too fast. They were right. Speed without quality control is just chaos with a growth chart.
India has millions of small hotels. No chain, no brand, no standards. We gave them a brand, a technology platform, and access to customers they could never reach on their own. The value proposition is simple.
Our valuation went from $10 billion to $2.7 billion. That's painful. But we're still the third-largest hotel chain in the world by room count. The company is real. The valuation was the part that wasn't.