Kept our eyes and ears close to the ground” At 19, Ritesh Agarwal disrupted India’s hospitality industry when he founded OYO in 2013, an aggregator for budget hotels. Gurugram-based OYO has seen nothing short of a meteoric rise, becoming the fourth-most valued unicorn in the country. Despite dropping out of college as a teenager, Agarwal rose to become the world’s second youngest self-made billionaire, after American reality TV personality and make-up mogul Kylie Jenner. The SoftBank-backed firm has a network of 1.58-lakh hotels across 35 countries, including India, the U.S. and the U.K. OYO, which is planning a public listing over the next few months, plans to raise about $1.5 billion at a valuation of $14-16 billion. The Idea! What drove the inception of OYO was our intention to create a thriving economy for small hotels and holiday homes, so that they could earn substantially more. We also wanted to provide the Indian middle-income consumer with trustworthy, affordable,