Online hotel booking platform OYO founder Ritesh Agarwal shared an interesting incident from the early days of his startup when his team was forced to manually fill a water tank for a hotel guest while he was negotiating with American investors if the company's valuation should be $3 million or $4 million.
Agarwal recounted the incident to emphasise the broad spectrum of tasks that startup founders must be ready to do if they want to be successful.
"In my early days, in one of the hotels there were two water tanks. One tank had run out of water and the other had full water. Guests wanted to stay in a floor where the tank was empty. Now, I couldn't risk the guest checking out. So, what do you do you? You do what you are taught when you grow up. You take a pipe, blow out the air and put it between the two tanks. The pipe ran out, then you do the baltis (buckets)," the OYO CEO said in Youtuber Think School's Indian Business Podcast.
While he and his team were handling the playfully challenging crisis, Agarwal had to attend a call from investors in the US who were seeking his company's valuation.
"Uss time piche se call aa raha hai (there's someone calling). This is late night, so [in] New York time, it's morning. Somebody calls and says, 'well, should your valuation be $3 million or $4 million'."
"Imagine the contrast. On one side millions of dollar, matlab kya million kya dollar, aur dusri taraf kya wo balti time pe transfer ho raha hai ya nahi (on one side it's millions of dollars, on the other you are worried if the bucket is moving on time). Imagine the contrast. This is the reality check entrepreneurs need to recognise. There is that 1% glamour but that 1% glamour very quickly takes you from the million dollar to the balti of water transfer."
Agarwal, who is a judge on Shark Tank India, also listed the key parameters he looks at before making an investment decision in a startup. The passion a founder has for the business and ability to commit long-term are the two main aspects Agarwal seeks. "Sometimes entrepreneurs have a contagious sense of passion. You can say that you know this is a person I want to do business with," he said.
"Second is, I think, naturally you would like to make sure that you can feel like you can work with them and you can support them in some way or the other. And last but not the least is I think you will have to have a sense of whether they're doing it for the long term, are they battle tested or not."
He flagged that a lot of founders give up and often fail to realise how close they are to becoming succesful.
"The biggest mistake in entrepreneurship is most people give up right before their success story is going to start. In our industry there were so many companies before us and people often ask 'why did you do well'? I think my honest reality is we lived to see the end of it. If enough people lived to see it, I think they would also be here."
Also Read: 'Had to print my own offer letter': OYO's CFO recounts Ritesh Agarwal hiring him almost a decade ago