Depth report

　　

Vijay Sharma was inspired when he listened to Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, in Hong Kong in October 2011. Previously, the young Indian entrepreneur knew little about Jack Ma’s business empire, which was rapidly growing into the world’s largest e-commerce company. When Jack Ma talked about the scale of the company's business and explained how he defeated many American competitors (especially the online auction site eBay), he was deeply attracted.

    "I didn't know my life would be changed by that meeting," Sharma said. He was working to create a digital payment company that would allow Indians to buy movie tickets or pay utility bills through their mobile phones. His company is a series of initially successful technological India, and will be particularly fascinated by the scale. He hopes to one day create a service that hundreds of millions of Indians want to use," said 35-year-old Sharma. "So, when I heard "500 million people", and when I heard him talk about "building a 100 billion dollar business", I exclaimed-wow! 

    Sharma is the newest member of the company, but its growth has been frustratingly slow. Listen to Jack Ma talking about the Alibaba model, which combines the online payment service Alipay with the online marketplace Taobao, which connects millions of Chinese small and micro businesses with consumers online.

    He suddenly realized. Back in India, he began planning to build a similar mobile market, and together with his payment business, thousands of Indian companies can easily sell various products from silk saris to Apple iPhone online. Paytm came into being, and now the company is one of India's most well-known start-ups, with a valuation of approximately US$2.5 billion.

    "Since then, I have been completely attracted by China, Alibaba and Jack Ma-all three have fascinated me," said Sharma, who was born in poverty like Jack Ma. In order to gain more advanced ideas, he came to Beijing to learn more from Chinese Internet companies such as Baidu and Tencent.

    Sharma was deeply impressed by Chinese Internet companies' attention to smartphones rather than desktop computers. In China, the extreme importance of instant messaging applications also impressed him. "That year, I realized that if you want to understand what is happening in the world's mobile Internet, don't go to the West, go to the East," he said.

    Sharma admitted that it will take longer to meet Ma Yun. After two more years of hard work, he decided in 2014 that he needed to raise funds. At that time, India's e-commerce boom had helped start-up competitors attract hundreds of millions of dollars.

    Paytm is at risk of being surpassed: "We are actually nothing, because we don't even have $10 million in the bank," he said. A venture capitalist friend suggested to him that Alibaba might be interested in Paytm. Sharma was very excited, and now he still remembers the date he flew to China to meet Jack Ma and his team: October 22, 2014.

    "The meeting that should have been less than an hour ended up for two and a half hours," he said. Sharma tried his best not to show admiration. However, after the meeting, due to fear that the cooperation might fail, he invited Jack Ma to take a selfie together. He happily took out his smartphone to show me their pictures. He need not worry. Within three weeks, Alibaba signed an agreement. Since then, Alibaba has invested US$680 million in Paytm, which is undoubtedly the group's largest investment in India.

    Alibaba's interest in Paytm stems from Jack Ma's desire to gain a foothold in a market with huge potential. Many people believe that India will reproduce the explosive growth of China's online business.

    Paytm also seems to be a good choice, especially since its online payment and marketing business model is so closely imitated Alibaba. However, the reason why the two companies can cooperate seems to lie in the chemical reaction between the two founders.

    It is not difficult to understand why people like Sharma. Sitting in a messy office on the outskirts of New Delhi, he was relaxed and casually dressed: faded jeans, blue casual leather shoes, and a plain shirt with the Paytm logo. He speaks quickly, and when he laughs at the mistakes he made in his early startups and laughs, his black-rimmed glasses shake up and down. He has an approachable feel, with almost no arrogance and arrogance that young tech giants usually display.

    However, he and Jack Ma have a deeper sympathy, because both of them have overcome their poor background. Sharma was born in a poor town in Uttar Pradesh, 125 kilometers from New Delhi. His father, a teacher, saved money and sent him to Delhi College of Engineering, but Sharma did not like courses taught in English. On the contrary, he was attracted by computers and concluded that starting a business was the only way he could make enough money to study in the United States.

    "I really felt like an orphan at the time and had to earn money to do all the things I wanted to do. So, when I was in college, I founded this Internet company so that I could earn money to go to Stanford. Money."

    In the end, Sharma put his California dream aside and focused on running a new company. His determination finally left a deep impression on Jack Ma. "He just echoed me like this-‘I understand your experience, I see your achievements today, and I pay tribute to that’," Sharma said when they first met. "Even when I didn't have money to eat, I continued to maintain the company, and the values and temperament of the middle and lower classes of my background... It all fits with him," he said.

    Alibaba’s investment has pushed Paytm into the ranks of India’s top Internet companies, closely following larger competitors, such as Amazon in the US and Flipkart in India. The latter’s goal for this fiscal year is to sell about 80%. 100 million U.S. dollars worth of goods is about 4 times that of Paytm.

    Maintaining this growth momentum is not easy. Many previously promising Indian startups have encountered funding difficulties, although Sharma said his frugal habits will help save himself from a similar fate. He is planning to expand rapidly, especially to transform a mobile payment company into a bank, and have as many as 500 million customers by 2020. He said that his ultimate goal is to build Paytm into an "Internet conglomerate", and the various platforms of the group will realize commodity transactions worth more than 100 billion U.S. dollars within 10 years.

    In addition to Jack Ma, Sharma also cited the self-made billionaire Masayoshi Son, the founder of Japanese technology group SoftBank (SoftBank), as an example to prove that even for those born in poverty, great goals can be achieved. of.

    "They experienced some unbelievable hardships during their childhood, but...in the end they created a company worth more than 100 billion U.S. dollars," he said. "One of them is in Japan and the other is in China. And we will be able to build Hundred-billion-dollar companies in India."