'My dream is to take the Paytm flag to San Francisco, New York, London,' says a businessman estimated to be worth $2.4 billion.
At 27, Vijay Shekhar Sharma was making 10,000 rupees ($134.30) a month, a modest salary that did not help his marriage prospects.
"In 2004-05, my father asked me to shut my company and take up a job even if it was for 30,000 rupees," Sharma, who went on to found digital payments firm Paytm in 2010, told Reuters. At the time, the trained engineer sold mobile content via a small company.
"Families of prospective brides would never call us back after finding out that I earn around 10,000 rupees a month," Sharma said. "I had become an ineligible bachelor for my family. "Last week, the 43-year-old Sharma led Paytm's $2.5 billion initial public offerings (IPO). The fintech firm has become the toast of a new India, where the first-generation of the country's startups are making stellar stock market debuts and minting new millionaires.
Born to a school teacher father and a homemaker mother in a small city in India's most populous Uttar Pradesh state, Sharma, who became India's youngest billionaire in 2017, still loves having tea at a roadside cart and often takes short morning walks to buy milk and bread.
"For a long time my parents had no idea what their son was doing," Sharma said of the time China's Ant Group first invested in Paytm in 2015. "Once my mother read about my net worth in a Hindi newspaper and asked me, 'Vijay do you really have the kind of money they say you have?'"
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