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Become A Startup Insider With Inc42 Plus
Join our exclusive community of business leaders &makers for in-depth tech stories and intelligence on India’s tech economy you won’t find elsewhere.
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Become a Startup Insider in 2024 with Inc42 Plus. Join our exclusive community of 10,000+ founders, investors & operators and stay ahead in India’s startup & business economy.
In this episode of Inc42 AMA, we are bringing to you the youngest billionaire of India and a child prodigy who hustled his way through the trials and tribulations of the startup journey to create a company worth over $6 Billion.
Presenting to you, the Paytm Boss, Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
Here are some interesting facts about Vijay:
- Vijay started college at the tender age of 15 and graduated as an engineer by the time he was 19. A child prodigy.
- Vijay is also a self-taught programmer.
- Back in 1997 when he was still in college, he started the website indiasite.net and sold it two years later for $1 million.
- Internally in the team, he is known as the Resident DJ of Paytm.
- Vijay studied in a Hindi medium school and faced a huge language barrier when he joined college but like a true hustler he picked up on English language and mastered it.
- Vijay started One97 (Paytm’s parent company) with a loan of Rs. 8 lakhs in 2001. Soon the repayment became tough which forced him to take up petty jobs to make ends meet like setting up LAN connections, delivering guest lectures and so on.
- He turned everything around and in 2017, Vijay was featured in the World Billionaires List by Forbes occupying 1567th rank. With this, he was crowned as India’s youngest billionaire.
- He is a die-hard fan of Sabeer Bhatia, Jack Ma and Masayoshi Son.
This AMA has concluded.
