Many times in the life of people, they are constantly terrified of failures and because of this, they lose their chances of success in the future, then they blame fate and time. But with hard work, you can achieve everything that you cannot do with luck, yes friends, today we are going to introduce you to the story of one such person.
Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma
Passion, courage, and a burning desire are some of the words that can define the life of Paytm Founder Mr. Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Starting a company like Paytm was not an easy task. Do not know after how many struggles and difficulties he made Paytm successful?
Let’s know the Success Story of Vijay Shekhar Sharma
Early Life of Vijay Shekhar:
Vijay Shekhar came from a middle-class family on 8th July 1973 in Uttar Pradesh. His father was a very honest school teacher and his mother was a housewife, his father also considered teaching tuition immoral. Vijay may not have been brought up like the children of rich families, but he has definitely inherited the values of his parents. Vijay started his education in a simple Hindi medium school in Vijaygarh. Vijay always stood first in his class. He was very good in his studies and on the basis of the same skill, he passed the 12th examination in just 14 years. For further studies, Vijay took admission in the Delhi College of Engineering. Being meritorious, he got admission but the path was not easy. Due to his studies in Hindi medium, his English was very weak and because of this, he had to face a lot of difficulties in his studies. Vijay, who was always a topper in school, could barely clear the engineering paper and all this was happening because of not know English.
At the same time, Vijay used to get frustrated, used to bunk classes, and many times the thought of returning home also kept coming into his mind. But something else was written in Vijay’s fate, he stayed. Vijay assumed that he would first control the British. After this, he started making efforts to learn English and he brought old books and magazines from the market and started learning English. For this he also adopted a unique method, he used to buy both Hindi and English books of the same book and read both together. If a person has the passion to learn something then he can do anything and Vijay Shekhar Sharma had a lot of will. Due to this, he did not hold back from doing anything. With his hard work and will, he soon learned English. It is a matter of those days when he did not do engineering classes, due to which Vijay used to have a lot of time, during this time Vijay was inspired by the founder of Yahoo, Sabeer Bhatia and he also wanted to do something big in it. Internet like that. And because Yahoo was built on the Stanford College campus, he also wanted to go there and study. But due to his financial condition and lack of English knowledge, he could not get admission there but he found a way to it and he started learning coding by himself following some geniuses at Stanford.
He did the same, he then slowly learned coding by reading from books and soon created a content management system of his own, which later India’s big newspaper news magazines started using.
After some time, he started a company named XS with a friend in 3rd year of college. Many people liked this business model of his and then in 1999 he sold XS to Lotus Interworks of USA for $ 5,00,000 and in this company, he started working as an employee. But Vijay Shekhar did not like to do the job for others and he soon left the job from there. But where could Vijay Shekhar, who has tasted the business, sit empty? He immediately started searching for new business ideas and after that, he founded One97.
He started a company named One97 in 2001. Shekhar invested all his deposits in this company, but due to the dot com bust, this company did not run in the beginning. Business failure breaks any person morally and financially. The same happened with Vijay Shekhar, he had to face financial problems. In this difficult time, both of his partners also left One97 and now Vijay started living in a cheap hostel near Kashmere Gate in New Delhi. There was a time when in order to save money, he used to travel to his destination on foot, sometimes he used to spend the whole day on only two cups of tea. At this time, he used to remember the poetry of Harivansh Rai Bachchan very much that those who try do not lose. Vijay Shekhar’s efforts also started paying off and his company, which provides services to GSM and CDMA mobile operators, gradually started returning to track of progress and started earning profits.
Establishment of Paytm (Payment Through Mobile):
Vijay Shekhar Sharma was an expert player in catching the pulse of time. At that time smartphones were becoming very popular in the market and from here the idea of cashless transactions came into his mind as well. He proposed to start the payment ecosystem in front of the board of One97. Since this was a brand new market and the company was slowly taking its roots, no one was ready to take this risk at this time. In such a situation, Vijay could have started a separate company with this idea if he wanted, but he did not do so.
Vijay Shekhar had to say, “If someone else was an entrepreneur, he could start a new company of his own by selling his equity. But I always wanted to build a 100-year-old company. I believe that men and boys are different because boys sell the company in a jiffy and men run the company and build a legacy”.
And then Vijay Shekhar established Paytm.com in 2001 by investing 1% of his personal equity, about $2 Mn in his new idea. In the initial phase, it was offering its services in the form of DTH recharge and prepaid mobile recharge. Then they gradually started increasing their services and then first electricity bill, and gas bill payment facilities, and then Paytm also started selling goods on paytm.com like other e-commerce companies. And recently, the note ban in India has done the work of lottery for PayTM and in today’s time PayTM became the need of crores of people. At this time Paytm.com is providing services of prepaid mobile recharge, data card recharge, postpaid mobile recharge, bill payment, etc. in all states of India today Paytm.com is India’s most popular online payment site and its total business of 15,000 crores has reached. And recently Vijay Shekhar Sharma was selected as “India’s Hottest Business Leader under 40” by Economic Times. In today’s time, Vijay Shekhar Sharma is ideal for every Indian who wants to do something with his hard work because this is the story of a person who dreamed of a million-dollar company when he had 10 rupees to eat food in his pocket. Neither were there.
The inspirational story of Vijay Shekhar teaches us not to give up at any point in life and then remember a few lines for successful people like these. There’s no fun in doing what others tell you to do,
The real fun is in doing what people say you can’t!
I hope you like the story of Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Thanks for Reading