Payments
is the medium of instruction]. I didn’t have fancy schooling. I was
lucky to get into engineering college in Delhi at the age of 15. I
taught myself English by memorizing rock songs and simultane-
ously reading translated textbooks in English and Hindi. When I
graduated, I was the youngest teenage engineer out of the Uni-
versity of Delhi. As the Pink Floyd song [Breathe] goes,Run, rabbit run.
Dig that hole, forget the sun,
And when at last the work is done
Don’t sit down it’s time to dig another one.
For long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
And balanced on the biggest wave
You race towards an early grave.My early heroes were internet entrepreneurs Jerry Yang and
Mark Andreessen. I started One97 Communications in 2000 and
began by selling content to users through telecom operators.
By 2010 the smartphone became the distribution channel. Payment
became our thing, and destiny was in our hands. In 2014 we
launched our licensed wallet product. By 2015, Ant Financial had
invested in us, then Alibaba and then SoftBank.
A whole generation of internet entrepreneurs in India have
small-town roots and hunger to build something significant and
successful. My father was a schoolteacher. I had four siblings;Paytm’s Sharma Is Ready
To Take On the World
By SARITHA RAI
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANSHIKA VARMA
VIJAY SHEKHAR SHARMA, 41, founded closely held One97
Communications and its brand Paytm (rhymes with ATM) almost
two decades ago. It offered a variety of digital services before
moving into payments in 2014, just as millions of urban Indians
began shopping online. Two years later, India’s banks created the
Unified Payments Interface, a tech umbrella to help banks and
fintech startups create services quickly, and the government
eliminated high-value currency notes, turbocharging demand for
Paytm’s services. Sharma, a self-described hippie who loves to
sprinkle U2 and Pink Floyd lyrics into his conversation, now has
backers including Alibaba’s Jack Ma, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son,
and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett.
Paytm is the market leader in India, where KPMG sees digital
payments growing at the fastest rate of any country, with transac-
tion value rising at an estimated annual rate of 20.2% from 2019 to
- But competition is heating up as Google, Walmart, and Face-
book jump into India, wielding cashback offers to lure customers.
Meanwhile, the government has proposed scrapping fees on digital
payments, Paytm’s core product. In an interview in Delhi, Sharma
described his career and how Paytm is adapting to India’s changing
market, cutting annual expenses 45% and preparing to raise new
funds to accelerate the next phase of growth in smaller cities.
SARITHA RAI: What led you to digital payments and e-commerce?
VIJAY SHEKHAR SHARMA: I grew up in a small town called Aligarh
where I studied in a very basic Hindi medium school [where Hindi
48