Travel tech platform Oyo's Group CFO Abhishek Gupta has revealed that he had to print out his own offer letter after founder Ritesh Agarwal hired him for the job in 2015.
Gupta was working with Philips when a classmate at Indian School of Business (ISB) introduced him to the Oyo founder. He realised the 21-year-old Agrawal was working on something really special.
"I got introduced to Ritesh by one of my ISB classmates who was working with Lightspeed Ventures. Ritesh was I think 21, and I was blown away when I met him. I met him like a few times. I met their board. I met their investors and I felt that these guys are building something which if you are not a part of, then you'll not be a part of it. The FOMO factor kicked in," he said during a session hosted by business school Masters' Union.
Despite being risk averse, Gupta decided to take the plunge and join the startup. "We were a series B company at that point of time. I started working with Oyo even before I formally joined. The moment we shook hands Ritesh said, 'Aapka time shuru ho gaya hai, mujhe nahi pata apka notice period hai, kya hai (Your job has started, I don't care if you have a notice period). As far as I'm concerned you are the CFO, you go and figure out what needs to be done,'" Gupta recounted.
Gupta wanted to resign from Philips to join Oyo, but he needed an offer letter first, which he quite literally had to print out himself. "So, I actually had to go to the office and print my own offer letter because there was no HR. There was a junior HR person, our chief HR officer got hired later."
"I went to the office, I figured out who the person was. I said 'aap mera chithi nikaal do' (issue me the letter) so that I can resign," he said.
In the session, Gupta explained Oyo's business model of working with unbranded hotels.
Gupta said: "We said 'your [hotels] job is to operate the hotel, rest everything we will manage. We will become your exclusive revenue management partner. We will co-brand you as Oyo residency and then we will put our operating system. We will drive the entire revenue for you, we will also do the pricing," he said.
He also touched on how Oyo had "opened too many fronts at the same time" and Covid-19 pandemic gave the company an opportunity to revisit strategy. They decided to focus on fewer markets such as India, Indonesia and shutting shop in some.
"Now, we are profitable at a group level and the core markets are making a lot of money, we have started doing more measured investments in some of the future markets," Gupta said.
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