Vijay Shekhar Sharma - The Cash Back King of PayTM(Part 2)

Hi friends, I'm doing great and hope the same for you as well! Lets finish the second part of the biography on Vijay Shekhar Sharma without wasting any time.

Looking for the First Part? Click here

Turning Around

It was 1997, his second year in the college. But, to earn from a newly established company, XS corps, was not easy. There were long waits and a great patience was needed before getting a call from an interested customer. As a result, he also started to search for a job along with this. Vijay was able to design websites and having content management knowledge, so he began a search for the related jobs in the newspapers. He went to various companies for interview. One of the interviewers got impressed and wished to give him the job, but he he changed his decision as soon as he realized that Vijay was still studying as most of the companies don't allow this even today. 

So that means he won’t be able to get a job then. What now? It’s more interesting what’s coming now. He now went to the companies asking for the work instead of the job itself. The idea was to outsource their work with him so he can complete the given work from his small company, XS corps. Some of the companies agreed and outsourced their work with his company. After completing the given works with the help of the computers in the college, he would email it back to the companies. This seemed to be a nice going from there; however, his family’s financial conditions forced him to seek a job very soon. His father had to pay off a loan taken from a friend for dis daughter's marriage.


XS corps was now going fine and in 1998, it was attempting to create a search engine in India. But, the idea could not take off due to lesser funds. The company then created its own content management tool hosted by Living Media and Express Group. For an instance, please note that the same company had helped Jet Airways in their web designing. In his final year at the college, Sharma decided to take the on Campus job with River Run Software. It was not him who decided to do a job; it was his family’s conditions that made him choose this job. 

He says, “Memories of that day are still fresh in my mind. The immense pressure of sitting in front of the interview board… I still feel the same pressure every time I’m sitting in front of Jack Ma (Alibaba’s owner, a big inspiration for Sharma).” Meanwhile, the content Management Company XS corps had to undergo some changes and it was later sold to a US entrepreneur for a million dollars in cash and some stocks in the company. However, Vijay had managed to help his father pay off his debts within months. Now, he had a job and he was earning there enough to survive along with his parents. Helping his father to get rid of the debts and working in a good company could be all for him at that age. But, it was not what he had ever decided; he wanted to be his own boss. Had he kept working there, we wouldn’t have seen PayTM, or the youngest billionaire for India.

The Starting Stone - PayTM

One97 communications

In search for something to do, Sharma founded One97 communications in 2000 and decided to create an online directory that people could access through SMS. The idea worked and Sharma joined hands with telecom companies. He expanded to value added services such as live Astrology, Cricket, Songs, etc. Ok! it was because of him we always used to get Cricket or Astrology alerts on our phone numbers? If that’s true, at least I should start to hate him now 😅😅  because I never liked to pay for cricket alerts or songs which I could easily download for free online. 

Jokes apart, it was a serious business strategy which very few of us can think of. Actually most of the people at that time liked to get score updates or to play a song of their likes. They also liked to receive weather updates on their devices directly, which may of course cost them for the corresponding value for added service. Yes, this was the idea behind which helped Vijay financially along with the new content website, One97communications.

Friends and the Downfall

Two of his friends living with him at South Delhi in a rent room, invested 5 lakhs each in the company. So Vijay decided to show exam results as well via SMS due to which it gained huge publicity among youngsters. However, the telecom companies were not proved to be as expected by Vijay. He did not realize that recovering money from the telecom operators was not easy. There was no plan of action or collection team as of then. This made the things worse again and the friends saw a downfall in the revenue even though the website sold an incredible number of ringtones, songs, wallpapers, etc. 

"His friends withdrew their invested money and put Vijay in a drastic situation again. Remember, we have talked about Vijay being afraid to spend a Rs. 10 note; actually this was the time when he felt that way. He went bankrupt when his friends left him. It was 2003, when he was again hunting for the jobs in newspapers. He would go door to door, fix computers for people and get a daily wage."

In 2005, he had to sell his 40% stake in One97communications to keep the company running. It was the time where anyone in his situation would have fallen and lost the courage, however, Vijay was not one of them. He did not put his foot out of the trouble and went along with the wind, working hard with an empty stomach sometimes. He got married in 2005 and had to face the real responsibility now. This could also have pressurized him to put his dream aside and live a normal life. But, when you’ve got a fire inside, these reasons to quit your passion become smaller. He approached SAIF and Silicon Valley Bank and thankfully, they invested $2 million in One97communcations. The website started to sell 100 million ringtones a month and company saw a turnover of 11 crores. This was just not it; it had crossed the previous turnover and yielded 20 times more than the previous one, i.e. 220 crores until 2010.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma - The Cash Back King

You must know, this was the year when Anil Ambani also invested in One97 Communications sold his shares recently in 2016 with a profit of around 27 times of his actual investment. Vijay decided to embed a payment gateway to the website and since the addition of the online payments gateway, he has never seen a fall. However, the competition was very tough as there were already some mobile payments gateways and websites available which fulfilled the same needs of a user. So Vijay had to make sure that the website design was more attractive than others and at the same time he had to get customers traffic on the website to maintain Board & investors’ faith.

Demonetization Push 

Having discussed most of the ups and downs, we should now know that the journey for the billionaire was not a piece of cake. But, the real miracle happened on 8th Nov, 2016, when our Prime Minister announced Demonetization. This was the finest opportunity for Vijay to take advantage of. Since the very first day, he began from the ground level and provided PayTM at petrol pumps and various merchant stores. Everyone, including me and you, used to rush to the PayTm scan code for most of our transactions. The PayTm website and the app too offered exciting cash backs in order to lure more and more customers. Today, there are more than 100 million customers with 35 million being active. Around 75 million orders are placed every month.

Currently, Vijay’s net worth is $1.47billion and he is continuously expanding PayTm with the help of investors like Jack Ma. By the time, I've finished this article we could see PayTm Bank in action too. 

Question that Matters ?

Leaving the worth and his success aside, I've many many Ifs in my mind. What would have happened if Vijay had not studied in that spare year just before the college? If he had gone somewhere else instead of his computer lab when he did not attend the college classes? If he had fully dropped the college because of the shame for his Hindi medium background? If he had continued with his job as a normal person would do? If he had lost the strength when he was bankrupt?


Trust me, if he had gone with any of the ifs I’ve mentioned, I would not have been writing on him at first and second, India wouldn’t have seen his youngest billionaire and the world would not have recognized India with his great marketing skills and space. We all go through with these Ifs the same way Sharma has gone. But, most of us focus on our Ifs more and we start caring how the world will judge us. This thought process kills our dreams right there and we become a regular person spending our lives with those ifs till we die.

Only thing I know is, a continuous hard work is required to accomplish any task and my friend, a true hard work doesn't care about the any "If ". With that note, I hope you keep doing the hard work!

😊