From buying second-hand technology magazines to becoming the cover boy for some of the world’s biggest publications, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, or VSS as he’s fondly called, is one of India’s most successful entrepreneurs.
Hailing from a small town in Uttar Pradesh, he was the youngest in his class at Delhi College of Engineering. When in college, VSS, who routinely cites Alibaba Founder Jack Ma and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank as his inspirations, started the website indiasite.net (in 1997). He sold it two years later for $1 million.
In 2000, he started one97 Communications, which offered mobile content such as news, cricket scores, ringtones, jokes, and exam results. Ten years later, he launched Paytm, which has gone from being a digital payment leader to a gaming, investment, ecommerce, education, and banking behemoth.
