At the age of 27, Vijay Shekhar Sharma has earned Rs. 10,000 a month, a modest salary that did not help his marriage prospects.
“In 2004-05, my father asked me to close the company and take a job even if it was 30,000 rupees,” Sharma, who went on to found a digital payments company Paytm in 2010, told Reuters.
At the time, this trained engineer was selling mobile content through a small company.
“Families of future brides will never call us back after learning that I earn around Rs 10,000 a month,” said Sharma. “I became an ineligible bachelor for my family.”
Last week, 43-year-old Sharma led Paytm $2.5 billion (about Rs 18,515) public output (IPO). The fintech company has become a celebration of a new India, where the first generation of the country’s startups are making excellent marks on the stock market and training new millionaires. .
Born to a teacher father and home appliance teacher mother in a small city in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, Sharma, who became India’s youngest billionaire in 2017, still loves to drink. tea at a roadside trolley and often take short morning walks to buy milk. and bread.
“For a long time, my parents didn’t know what their son was doing,” Sharma said of the first time China’s Ant Group invested in Paytm in 2015. “Once my mother read about net worth. mine in a Hindi newspaper and asked me: “Vijay do you really have the currency they say you have? ‘”
Forbes estimates Sharma’s net worth at $2.4 billion (approximately Rs 17,775).
“What are my odds?”
Paytm started just over a decade ago as a mobile recharge company and grew rapidly after the ride-hailing company Uber listed it as a quick payment option in India. Its use skyrocketed in 2016 when India’s shocking ban on high-value banknotes spurred digital payments.
Paytm, also counts SoftBank and Berkshire Hathaway as backers, which have since branched out into services including insurance and gold sales, movie and flight ticket sales, bank deposits and money transfers.
While Paytm pioneered digital payments in India, the space quickly became crowded as Google, Amazon, WhatsApp, and Walmart’s PhonePe has launched payment services to capture a portion of the market that is expected to grow to more than $95.29 trillion (about Rs 70,57,41,560) by the end of March 2025, according to EY.
That push by global giants has given Sharma a rare moment of doubt, which he raised with the SoftBank mogul’s billionaire founder Masayoshi Son.
“I called Masa up and said – now that everyone is here, what do you think my odds are?”
Son, an early investor in Yahoo! and Alibaba. other main business.
Sharma, who is married and has a son, said he has never been seen since.
While some market analysts are concerned about when Paytm will turn a profit, Sharma is confident about his company’s success.
In 2017, Paytm launched a bill-paying app in Canada and a year later entered Japan with a mobile wallet.
“My dream is to bring the Paytm flag to San Francisco, New York, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo. And when people see it, they say – you know what, it’s an Indian company,” Sharma said. .
© Thomson Reuters 2021
