The story of young Bhavish Aggarwal, the CEO and co-founder of home-grown taxi aggregator, OlaCabs, may put Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a transport of delight as it is all about the PM’s pet topics – skill and entrepreneurship.
OlaCabs, a ride-sharing start-up headquartered in Bangalore, has a network across 100 cities and commands 60% of the market share.
Despite his stupendous success, this 29-year-old IIT-Bombay graduate remains as grounded as one could be.
Surprisingly, Bhavish does not own a car. He still uses cabs to move about. “Technology could allow many Indians not to buy a car at all,” says Bhavish.
Born in Ludhiana, Bhavish, just like every other success driven and successful entrepreneur began at a very early age. After graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology in 2008, he started his career in Microsoft Research India as a research intern and later got reinstated as an assistant researcher.
After quitting Microsoft, Bhavish started an online company which dealt into selling of short duration tours and holiday online.
Now, while he was at it he happened to rent a car from Bangalore to Bandipur and had a terrible experience. The driver of the car stopped right in the middle of the road and started renegotiating the whole deal. Bhavish refused to agree to his terms and the driver abandoned him on the road. The entrepreneurial-headed Bhavish instead of winning the situation or the problem decided to fix it for good. He researched and came to the conclusion that a lot of customers had fallen prey to such situations and were desperately in need of quality cab service and that was when for the first time he could vision the amount of potential a cab booking service could have.
Instead of buying and renting out their own cars, OlaCabs partnered with a number of taxi drivers and added a touch of modern technology to the whole set-up where people could book cars at short notice through their call centres and from their app. The bookings allowed half or full-day rentals and even outstation taxis.
Now, the company supports a network of more than 3 lakh cars which results in 1.5 lakh bookings per day. Talking about innovation, he came up with the idea of charging lesser than an autorickshaw by offering cabs at ridiculously cheap prices of Rs 10 per km. Leaving no stone unturned, they also collaborated with the autos with the launch of Ola Autos and they then launched Ola Café through which one can order food, grocery, vegetables, etc. and get it delivered to their households.
However, all this was not that easy. Apart from taking on Uber for control of the country’s rapidly growing taxi-app market, this brilliant engineer from IIT had to face lot of opposition at home front. His father initially could not buy his idea or rather he could not convince his enterprising thought to him.
“When I started off, he thought I was becoming a travel agent,” Bhavish recalls of his father’s doubts when he first came up with the start-up idea.
“He said, ‘We have gotten you educated from IIT Bombay, you have got such a great job’…And he literally didn’t speak to me for 6 months after that.”
