“Hiring was a massive challenge,” recalls Raghunandan G, who cofounded the Bangalore-based ride-sharing aggregator TaxiForSure in 2011, four years after finishing his MBA at the Indian Institute of Management. “My business school classmates all had education loans. The guys from engineering school were married, and had housing loans. Startups were seen as incredibly risky.” Even friends who believed in him and his idea were reluctant to come on board.
Around the same time, Bhavish Aggarwal, an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) graduate, was bringing another ride-sharing aggregator called Ola to life. In 2010, as a staff researcher for Microsoft, he had rented a car to take him to Bandipur National Park. Midway there, the driver decided to renegotiate the rate. Aggarwal argued, and the driver forced him out of the car and drove away. With fellow IIT graduate Ankit Bhati, he opened a ride-sharing business based in Mumbai, which they named Ola. As he later told the Economic Times, when his parents heard the plan, they asked why he would quit Microsoft to become a travel agent.
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