OYO's second act and what almost killed it
With Ritesh Agarwal · Hosted by Raj Shamani
Episode summary
OYO founder Ritesh Agarwal joins Raj Shamani on Figuring Out for an unusually direct conversation about the company's near-death experience during the pandemic, the painful restructuring that followed, and the version of OYO he is rebuilding for the next decade. Ritesh talks about scaling too fast, the cost of expanding into too many countries at once, why hospitality is a fundamentally local business that punishes global ambition, and how he rebuilt trust with hotel partners after a period of public conflict. The episode closes with what Ritesh has learned about himself as a founder in his early thirties — and what he still gets wrong.
Key takeaways
- 1.Scaling into too many geographies at once was OYO's single biggest mistake — hospitality does not benefit from a unified global playbook.
- 2.Pandemic-era restructuring forced a return to unit-level discipline that the company had abandoned during hypergrowth.
- 3.Rebuilding partner trust is slower and costlier than acquiring new partners; the brands that survive consumer-facing crises are the ones that fix the back-end first.
- 4.Founders who raise too much too early lose the ability to say no to growth they shouldn't pursue.
- 5.Personal growth as a young founder is mostly about learning which advice to ignore.
Full transcript
Transcript edited lightly for readability. Timestamps refer to the YouTube video above.
Ritesh, the pandemic was brutal for OYO. How close did the company come to not making it?
We came very close. Hospitality went to zero overnight in every country we operated in. The fact that we survived was a function of cutting fast, being honest with partners and lenders, and accepting that the version of OYO that existed in 2019 was never coming back.
Looking back, what was the single biggest strategic mistake?
Going into too many countries before we had perfected the model in one. Hospitality is hyper-local. The contract you sign in Gurgaon doesn't translate to Jakarta or Manchester. We learned that the expensive way.
What do you think you still get wrong as a founder?
I still over-trust my first instinct. Sometimes it's a superpower. Often it isn't. I'm working on slowing down the decisions that don't need to be made in the room.