OYO Founder Ritesh Agarwal Writes: Success Lies in Going Beyond the Big Idea

Most founder stories start with a Eureka moment—or that is what entrepreneurship folklore would have you believe. Ideas act as primary catalysts for every business, but the reality is far more complex. Often, the dawn of a start-up is a culmination of a drawn-out process where thoughts and concepts undergo constant evolution. This early phase isn’t glamorous: it is about being the first salesperson, the first customer service representative and in my case even the first housekeeper.

A decade-old story I often tell up-and-coming founders is how I ended up pouring buckets of water into an empty tanker for an irate guest at one of Oyo’s earliest hotels, all the while trying to impress an investor over the phone who was keen on pouring in a million dollars into our fledgling business. At that embryonic stage, your business demands superhuman dedication that will need you to juggle multiple roles without losing sight of growth.

Comfort in Chaos

Early-stage founders often ask me about work-life balance. The truth? There is very little, at least to begin with. But there needs to be a work-work balance, which is knowing the aspects of business that deserve finite energy and time. One of the biggest lessons I learned during that period was to be comfortable with chaos.

Your ideas will change, plans will shift, so being adaptable is crucial. Oyo started with the notion of simply listing budget hotels, but the need for quality led us to take control of standardisation processes and onboard hotels of our own.

The growth phase is akin to a tidal wave. The transition is rapid: you go from working with a handful of employees to dealing with hundreds of them across multiple cities and managing the expectations of investors who expect growth.

Apart from expanding across India, Oyo was also foraying into the international market, starting with Malaysia in 2015. Cultural differences significantly impact business interactions. Effective adaptation is essential. We had to make that shift almost every few weeks because we were entering vastly different geographies.

Additionally, my focus during this phase was hiring the right people. When a start-up hits a rapid growth phase, it feels easy to hire just about anybody. I determined very early that I needed fellow leaders who were driven to build something truly substantial and enduring.

But that is also often the hardest part for any young founder: switching from someone who knows every detail of the business to someone who must trust others to handle critical operations. I personally like to visit or stay at as many Oyo properties around the world as possible. This was difficult to achieve at that time because we were launching new hotels almost every day.

The growth stage is a bit of a paradox: you need to zoom out strategically while simultaneously developing a sharper eye for detail and building systems that will last a long time. That is what will reward you as your organisation matures.

The Right Problems

Over the years, I have realised that my role has become simpler but deeper at the same time, especially in terms of strategic direction and key relationships. In Oyo’s early days, success meant solving problems quickly. Now, it means we are solving the right problems.

I spend more time in reflection, more time thinking about where the industry will be in five years than where we will be next quarter without of course diminishing the importance of the latter.

This maturity also brings a unique challenge: maintaining the start-up spirit while building institutional processes. How do you keep the entrepreneurial flame alive when you have thousands of employees across multiple countries?

The evolution here is learning to institutionalise innovation by creating systems that encourage calculated risk-taking and rapid experimentation. With time, I have realised that these late-stage lessons in balancing structure with innovation are crucial.

The public markets don’t just evaluate your current performance, they bet on your ability to maintain this balance at scale. Preparing for public markets has taught me perhaps the most valuable lesson of my entrepreneurial journey: the time to start thinking like a public company is not when you file for an initial public offer (IPO), it’s long before that.

When we raised our first Term Loan B (TLB), many were surprised by how smoothly the process went. That was primarily because we had been operating by public company standards for a few years. It’s like training for a marathon. You don’t start running the day before the race.

Additionally, early in our growth phase, Oyo made what I consider one of our best decisions: building a truly independent board. It wasn’t about ticking compliance boxes but about surrounding ourselves with diverse perspectives that would challenge our assumptions and ask the hard questions we might be avoiding.

For us, the scale has changed, but not the fundamentals. Whether you are running a start-up or a multinational, it all comes down to solving actual problems.

I still check into one of our hotel brands unannounced, get excited about customer feedback and believe that our best innovations are ahead of us. The start-up world loves talking about end-goals: unicorn status, IPOs and so on. At its heart, however, entrepreneurship continues to be about constant reinvention.

The writer is founder and group chief executive, Oyo