How PayTM’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma chased his dream instead of a degree

As part of the preparations for his engineering entrance tests, Vijay Shekhar Sharma taught himself to read two books at a time, one in Hindi and the other in English, both on the same subject. He had gone to school in Harduaganj, a small town near Aligarh, in Uttar Pradesh, where his father was a schoolteacher and mother, a housewife. They lived a normal life, under abnormal financial constraints.

His mother told him to prepare well for the engineering entrance tests, for they did not have enough money to send him to a private engineering college. Vijay had finished class twelve at age fourteen. The teachers at his Harduaganj school had found him too bright for his class more than once, and had made him skip grades, pushing him into the higher levels. But no engineering college would take him before he turned fifteen. That meant for the next one year he had nothing to do but prepare for the JEE.

His schooling had been in the Hindi medium.

The engineering tests could be taken in Hindi, but Vijay decided to take them in English, perhaps because the medium of instruction at engineering colleges was to be English. With time on his hands, Vijay devised a way to study two books simultaneously, both on the same subject, one in Hindi and the other in English. If he had to study, say, physics, he would read the thing first in Hindi and then in English. So if he came across the term “momentum” in the English book, he would immediately look it up in the Hindi one, finding it there as “samveg”, and move on. That was how he learned his subjects in English.

But not quite well enough. In the entrance tests, which had objective-type questions, he had to first read the multiple answers to fully understand the question. If he saw “kmph” in one of the answers, he knew the question was about speed. He understood the questions well enough to make it to the electronics and communications course at the Delhi College of Engineering in 1994. He was not yet sixteen, and required special permission from the university, which was granted as he had ranked high in the tests. Vijay became the youngest student of his batch. And a complete misfit.

“I was cast out by people who were super smart, the cool guys from Delhi. I could barely talk to people, let alone make friends. I was really young, and being so young in a hostel doubled the pressure on me. I would sit in the computer centre, or in the library, and wonder why this notebook computer was called a notebook because it was not a notebook,” says Vijay.

Those traumatic days have become happy memories, now that one97 Communications, Vijay’s company, has become one of the most valued start-ups, with a robust business in mobile wallets, an online marketplace under the Paytm brand, and a licence obtained from the Reserve Bank of India to set up a payments bank.

Paytm’s office in Noida’s Sector 5 is functional, with lots of space, lots of people, and a large reception area teeming with job applicants.

Vijay’s desk is just a desk, not a cabin, nor is it in the corner. It is one in a long line of identical desks. On his left, about 25 feet away is a wall with large letters that say: “We don’t need no thought control.” Vijay sits with his back to a busy passage and a row of conference rooms made of glass.

We sit in one of those, with a cup of coffee for me that tastes as though it was made in a Noida dhaba, and a sandwich for him. Vijay, born in 1978, is great fun to talk to – warm, candid, and sincere. He is slightly thick around the middle and has a high-pitched laugh that frequently punctuates the conversation, more so when talking about his early days. “Eventually I made some friends at the DCE in whom I could confide and to whom I could confess my lack of worldly knowledge. They told me the notebook computer was called a notebook because it was in the shape of a notebook.”

Vijay learned other words. But he could not shake off the feeling that everyone else around him was just so superior. they were like rock stars. Vijay, on the other hand, had moved from being a topper at his school at Harduaganj to a backbencher at the DCE because he could not understand the questions the professors asked. That made him want to hide in his own shadow. It also made him believe that he had little chance of getting a job, and that he had to do something about it, ideally something other than seeking a job.

He began to read the newspapers, writing down every word he did not understand and looked up their meaning. once he began to understand what the newspapers printed, he moved on to magazines. He started going to the second-hand books market that spreads itself out every Sunday morning on the pavements of Daryaganj and Asaf Ali road. there he picked up copies of Fortune magazine.

Fortune magazine told Vijay Shekhar Sharma about Silicon Valley in California, the hub of technology start-ups.

This was 1995-96. There was magic going on in the valley. There was the internet, there were Yahoo, Netscape, Marc Andreessen, Jerry Yang. There was a popular belief in the valley that people who did not complete their education created great companies. That gave Vijay hope: if he did not pass college, he could still do something, such as build an internet company. And, instead of waiting for their final exams, Vijay and a friend started a company while still in college. They named it XS Corps.

XS Corps built content management systems for the web. Vijay had a business card that said: east 37, K Gate, New Delhi. it meant east Hostel, room No. 37, Kashmiri Gate. it had the DCE computer centre’s phone number as the office number and the hostel’s number as the residence phone. They aspired to get a pager. But that was expensive. So they made friends with a shopkeeper nearby and used his telephone number as their office number on their business card. When someone called, the friend in the shop would say Vijay was not in, or away in a meeting, and take down the caller’s number. Later Vijay would return the call.

Vijay noticed there were several job advertisements from companies for employees who could work on their content management systems and related technologies. He would go for these interviews and say, “I’m not here for the job. But I have a company that can do this job for you.”

Some “interviewers” did not take this kindly. “Why did you waste my time?” they would ask. Some others would remark: “Interesting! But how will you do it?”

“We have computers in college. I will do it and send it over email.”

Excerpted with permission from The Tip of the Iceberg: The Unknown Truth Behind India’s Start-Ups, Suveen Sinha, Portfolio Penguin.