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| Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Paytm founder's rags to riches story = Screengrab from a YouTube video (video below) |
Serial entrepreneur Vijay Shekhar Sharma, who heads the billion dollar startup Paytm says he was so badly singed by the dotom crash, he tasted poverty firsthand .
Speaking to NDTV, he says there were days when he did not have money for dinner. He would walk instead of taking a bus to save Rs 10.
"Let's say having two cups of tea was a perk for me," he says,
The report unfortunately has no details on the circumstances, which forced Vijay Shekhar Sharma into the tight spot. It only mentions the stock market crash, which followed the dotcom meltdown of 1999, and a failed venture, in the passing, without getting into the details.
A Delhi Engineering College alumnus, Vijay Shekhar Sharma started his first company XS Corps in 1998 and sold it as well, while studying. Then he worked with a few companies in fairly senior roles before starting One97 in 2000, a VAS player, which evolved successfully with the industry trends.
In 2010 came Paytm, one of the most important startups to emerge in the Indian tech space.
That's what his publicly available CV says without giving any hint of his struggle.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma has surely left his difficult says behind. Besides One97's success, Paytm propelled him into big league. Jack Ma of the Alibaba Group invested 575 million in Paytm, which also counts Ratan Tata, among its investors.
This week Vijay Shekhar Sharma also bagged a payment bank licence from the Reserve Bank (RBI), which constitutes another significant initiative for his company.
A Hindi-medium boy from Aligarh, Vijay Shekhar Sharma joined the Delhi College of Engineering, which taught in English, a language in which he was seriously challenged. The lectures were so incomprehensible he describes it as his "Taare Zameen Par moment with alphabets flying around."
Unable to keep up, he even stopped attending lectures altogether. But he taught himself English using dictionaries and reading up second-hand magazines and made a strong comeback.