Around a year ago, I had written a post on OYO Rooms on LinkedIn questioning if its business model was the startup equivalent of a Ponzi scheme.

At that time, OYO Rooms was a managed marketplace for budget hotels in India and had gained fame on account of the tender age of its founder, Ritesh Agarwal (who had started the company at the age of 18) and more importantly for being one of few early-stage Indian startups backed by over $100 million in funding from marquee investors like SoftBank.

AUTHOR

Sumanth Raghavendra

Sumanth is a serial entrepreneur with more than eighteen years experience in running startups. He is currently the founder of Deck App Technologies, a Bangalore-based startup attempting to re-imagine productivity software for the Post-PC era. Sumanth’s columns appear regularly in leading publications. He holds MBA degrees from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and Thunderbird, The American Graduate School of International Management, USA.

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