Unimaginable dreams are frequently realized in success stories. We see the face of success but have little idea what goes into becoming a successful man or how exciting or challenging his path has been.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the 43-year-old Paytm Founder, was born to a schoolteacher father and a housewife mother. Vijay Shekhar Sharma, who is from a tiny town in the largest state of Uttar Pradesh, has experienced everything that any ordinary middle-class youth in our country goes through. But what distinguishes him from the crowd is that he carved out a place for himself that most of us can only dream about.
His journey from earning Rs 10,000 per month to becoming the next billionaire has been flawless. At 27, Vijay Shekhar Sharma had not achieved much success, earning only Rs 10,000 per month. And this was insufficient to qualify him as a bachelor.
“In 2004-05, my father ordered me to close my company and take up a job, even if it was for Rs 30,000,” he says of his journey. On a lighter note, Reuters quotes Vijay Shekhar Sharma as saying, “Prospective brides’ families would never contact us back after learning that I make roughly 10,000 rupees each month. My family had made me an ineligible bachelor.”
Vijay Shekhar Sharma recently led Paytm’s USD 2.5 billion initial public offerings (IPO). Furthermore, an investing behemoth headed by American business billionaire Warren Buffet earned a profit of USD 16 million on the selling of 1.4 million Paytm IPO shares.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma rose to prominence in 2010 when he established the digital payments company Paytm. At the time, the skilled engineer worked for a small company that supplied mobile content. Paytm began as a cellphone recharge service and swiftly expanded after Uber listed it as a quick payment method in India.
Paytm received a significant boost in 2016 when the government imposed demonetization, which resulted in a ban on high-value currency notes and encouraged the use of digital payments. Vijay Shekhar Sharma had become India’s youngest billionaire by 2017. Sharma’s net worth is now estimated to be USD 2.4 billion by Forbes.
The simple boy from Aligarh, who still enjoys drinking tea from a roadside cart and going for morning trips to purchase milk and bread, jokes, “My parents were unaware what their son was up to for a long time. After reading about my net worth in a Hindi daily, my mother asked me, ‘Vijay, do you truly have the type of money they say you have?'”
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