A leading mobile marketplace and mobile wallet company, Paytm has also sought permit for payment banking recently. Interestingly, Sharma reveals the mobile payment business wasn’t even on the company’s agenda.
A first generation entrepreneur, Sharma is difficult to pin down because of his hectic travelling. He finally agrees to a telephone interview, in which he speaks about his journey as an entrepreneur, his struggle as a Hindi school student to pick up English in engineering college, and coming a full circle by becoming an investor himself.
Edited excerpts:
Can you trace the path from each of your earlier projects towards reaching the success that Paytm has come to signify?
I have treated all my assignments as a management course. I jumped jobs to learn management strategies, which I could implement later on in my company. One of the important lessons I learnt was the importance of quality team members. You might have great aspirations but if your team members don’t sync to that, then you are stuck. The second thing I learnt was perseverance.
Working with large companies taught me how they end up becoming places where innovation and new things are not encouraged. In my company, I make sure we always respect new ideas, new businesses. That’s how Paytm came up. One of the team members and my college junior, Abhishek Rajan, wanted to try out the payment business. We supported him.