The 21-year-old building India's largest hotel network
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
And screwed a bunch of people on his way up.
Confident, assertive and charismatic, he always manages to come on top. In other words, a successful modern start-up artist.
I have never experienced this when booking through kayak, priceline, orbitz and numerous other sites
I've stayed in some really basic hotels in India. You get to choose between cheap and awful or expensive and decent. The bad places aren't always bad to keep costs low. Often the proprietors don't have the skills to run it any other way.
A lot of mom & pop businesses could benefit from this sort of approach.
>A similar idea - which eventually evolved into Oyo Rooms - won him a coveted Thiel Fellowship - a programme sponsored by PayPal co-creator and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel - which pays for 20 teenagers each year to stop studying and try to set up a business instead.
Someone tell me there are safeguards in place, because this just sounds like an award for dropping out. I assume there have to be assurances from the school/college that they can return to their studies later if business doesn't take off?
Alot of the fellows do end up going back to school and they're all smart kids who wont have trouble returning to any university they wish to attend.
That said, it is a bit ironic that Thiel is against the current educational system since he has undoubtedly benefited from it
Not really. Being a successful entrepreneur is quite different from being a good student.
But yea, those that have chosen to go back to school have done much better than if they were to stay in school in the first place... Two of the 6 I was thinking of are now in PhD programs while they never finished undergrad.
It seems to me (admittedly an outsider) that Thiel learned the wrong lesson from Zuck's success with dropping out to found Facebook. It wasn't because Zuck dropped out of college that Facebook was successful - it was because Facebook was already successful (already seeing exponential growth) that Zuck dropped out. Thiel then took this incorrect lesson to encourage lots of other students from elite universities to also drop out, which has had predictably disappointing results.
Similarly, Ritesh wasn't successful because he dropped out and became a Thiel Fellow - he was accepted to the Thiel Fellowship because he had already dropped out and had seen some success (or lied that he had, as it seems).
> Most if not successful get another job in the technology industry
Getting a job is great, but that just means that Thiel's stamp of approval has been placed on the individual, instead of the college's. The upside being years/thousands of dollars in saved tuition, the downside being that Thiel is not commonly known outside of Silicon Valley circles. I'd rather take the degree any day.
I think you also misunderstand Thiel's motives for the fellowship... it is not saying that because Zuck was sucessful because he dropped out of college, Zuck was already lucky that he wasn't in debt. The student debt crisis has been getting worse and worse over the past decade, and Thiel's real core idea is that student debt is a huge barrier for young people to take risks (such as starting or joining a startup) during or after college.
For myself, I actually dropped out of high school to accept the fellowship. At that point I already had 3 years work experience at MIT, and was going to drop out of school anyways to accept a position at a large tech company in the Valley making three times the Fellowship's yearly grant. What the Fellowship offered me was the chance to do something very risky and being able to get into the game quickly with an advantage. I think it was the right choice for me.
I also recognize the debt issue, although I suspect that most of the Thiel Fellows would have little trouble getting full scholarships, as I did, or come from stable, upper middle class households with high-achieving parents who would be able and willing to cover the cost of tuition, as I also did. My point is that college dropouts or recent graduates (even from elite colleges) are not necessarily the best people to start successful high-growth ventures, regardless of whether they're in debt or not. Just because Zuck did it with Facebook (although from what you said, this didn't figure into Thiel's decision to start the Fellowship) doesn't mean that it makes sense to encourage high-achieving college students to drop out and start a business - and the results have borne that out (though perhaps your internal data says otherwise).
In essence:
1. By the time someone is an ideal high-growth startup founder, college debt should no longer be a big concern, either because they never had it in the first place or because they paid it off with the high-paying job they got after college.
2. Most of those who are suffering from high amounts of student debt are probably never going to be ready to found a high-growth startup that someone like Thiel would be interested in anyway.
The real solution to the student debt crisis is to optimize high school education such that it is sufficient for most jobs (or perhaps high school education, followed by part-time associate degree + co-op), and alter societal/employers' expectations to accept that a BS is overkill. Unfortunately, that is a very thorny sociopolitical issue that isn't easily solvable by throwing money at moonshot companies founded by smart young people, and it's this latter activity that Thiel has the most experience in.
Before a BS became table stakes for decent employment, you could rely on free, government-provided education to get you to a good job. Getting high-achieving students to drop out of elite colleges to start high-growth ventures is a fundamentally orthogonal matter to returning society to that norm.
My understanding is that in the US $100k over two years is equivalent to a comfortable middle class salary (outside SF, NY and perhaps one or two other places). It appears that in India it would be more like a exceptionally high salary placing someone in a top income bracket (except perhaps in Mumbai and one or two other places), an amount that would take several years to accumulate after getting a job at a prestigious multinational. The sort of sum someone with more modest expectations could even contemplate being a respectable retirement amount.
Keeping the amount equivalent internationally is perhaps only fair, especially since Thiel Fellows might look to relocate internationally to achieve their aspirations anyway, but it also means a sum proposed as a short term subsidy in the US represents actual wealth in some parts of the world.
Judging from the link, what OYO is doing well is identifying hotels which are in a mid-range price bracket by local standards which can justify that charge on account of service comparable to a Western budget hotel rather than on account of "deluxe" features that push the price up despite elements of the service, power supply or plumbing.
> 2,200 hotels operating in 100 cities across India ... and 1,500 employees.
... financed with ...
> monthly revenues of $3.5m (£2.3m)
Revenues of ~$1,600/hotel/month? ~$2,300/employee/month? Am I misunderstanding something?
On the other hand, if you want a 100% guaranteed Western branded hotel experience, you'll pay through the nose for it. Back when I was working in Delhi, 4-star-ish hotels charged $400/night and up and the Trident Hilton in Gurgaon was $700.
In general, it's important to celebrate when people excel because the norm is a snarky comment on the Internet.