Is MakeMyTrip Still the BEST Travel Option in 2025? | YourStory

25 years of MakeMyTrip and its history. A new age Indian business can achieve this — 10 billion gross revenue run rate, 1 billion revenue run rate, probably the most profitable internet company in the country. Not just healthy and good on the other side, but in a much, much better position. The last 12 months have been our best ever. We were among the first internet companies in the US — a successful IPO, one of the very few companies. Just because of where India is, how we are poised, how travel is taking off, we're seeing all of that. I bet your flight this morning was packed, every hotel is packed, everything else. People are traveling a lot, whether for business or for leisure, and we are obviously helping that. It's been really exciting 25 years. Roller coaster for sure, had its own sort of hiccups along the way. Can't not be, because it's been an entrepreneurial journey, and you know what an entrepreneurial journey is as well, right?

It feels amazing. It firstly doesn't feel like 25. It just feels like a time blur — it's moved so fast. If someone says 25, that's a lifetime, right? But couldn't have asked for a better 25 in a sense. So great to come out not just healthy and good on the other side, but in a much, much better position. The best part of this 25 is that the last 25 months, or dare I say the last 12 months, have been our best ever. We do genuinely believe that the best is yet to come, because of not just MakeMyTrip — I think just because of where India is, how we are poised, how travel is taking off, we're seeing all of that. I bet your flight this morning was packed, every hotel is packed, everything else. People are traveling a lot, whether for business or for leisure, and we are obviously helping that. I think the company is just in a much better position in terms of the way we are structured, ready to take off, embracing new technologies. So 25 and energized.

I worked with two really good, high-governance, quality companies. It was ABN Amro Bank here — banking is like that — phenomenal bosses, both Romesh Sobti, Chandra, just learned so much from them. And then in GE Capital, I got the opportunity to work with someone like Piyush Basi and a whole host of other amazing people. I saw them at work — Niten Gupta was my immediate boss when I was hired, Raman Roy — people who were really inspirational and went on to do phenomenal things. You could learn a lot just by being there. I always say you learn the most by osmosis — be in the same room. Even today, Rajesh does that too. Whenever we have our reviews, we invite a lot of the young folks into the room. The reason is very simple: you have to trust everyone who works with you. Whatever you're discussing — if people could copy that, by now many people would have done better than us. The real reason is you don't know which young kid is going to get turned on listening to some of that stuff and say, 'Oh my god, this is exciting' — and next time it's driving him or her to do something better. Because I remember that happening to me many, many times in my early career, just by being in the room and being excited about getting a chance to be in the same space for two to three hours as the CEO who's locking horns with product people and tech people, and they're giving it back.

That's the reality. They're saying, 'Listen, I can do a lot, but most of the time I get stuck in a company where my boss thinks I'm an idiot, or it's beyond my rank to make these points.' And that's horrible, because how will you get the best? The people who will give us our best inputs are the ones closest to the customer, which fundamentally means they're young people. We can't think like 30-year-olds — I'm a 55-year-old, so it's not going to happen. It's only going to happen if we entrust our marketing and product people, our customer insight people. Now we have many specialist teams who are picking up all those insights, but we're listening to them, not foisting our own opinion. So that's the reason we do that.

Now I'll come to the actual question. Setting up — I never thought we'd be sitting here 25 years down the line. I didn't even think of any of that, to be very honest. The setup was simply because the internet was happening, it was changing life, and I wanted to do something about it. A big company I was in was not ready to do something about it, and I said the only way to crack this is to do it yourself. What will move online first? Things we are doing on the phone. Cut back to 1999, 2000 — online stock broking on the phone, travel on the phone. Take it online, because you never met your broker maybe on Diwali, you never met your travel agent — you spoke and then the runner came, took your check and all. Who knew this digital revolution would happen in this way, where we'd be making payments with two clicks on our phone? But I think you take it a step at a time. That was my reason. I always say I was foolish enough to start alone. I was lucky enough to find some great guys along the way — one of them sitting next to me, two other guys. Many, many good people. But there's a limit on how many co-founders you can make. But I was smart enough to hold on to them. I can only take credit for that. Because if you get talent, you get people who are very passionate about your company, as passionate as you are, then you're stupid if you don't lock them in and give them skin in the game one way or the other. They've got to feel like they're truly owners of the business. And we make many people in the company feel like that by allowing them to go ahead, do what you want, make some mistakes — it's fine. Take us along, tell us what you're doing. But if you stop doing that, we'll stop being entrepreneurial.

We have a lot of young folks who are very empowered to go ahead and build new products. Like right now, our chief product officer, a fantastic guy, is dreaming of new stuff all the time with his team and they're building it. Obviously, they come for approval to Rajesh. Earlier, I would work closely with them. They come for approval, but Rajesh — I know eight out of ten, he'll quiz them this and that, but eventually say, 'Go do it.' Only then will we know. We'll fail, we'll try five, we'll fail two, and hopefully three will work. It's always a law of averages kind of thing — if you succeed more often than you fail, you'll come up on top. But if you don't try, nothing's going to happen, then we're going to stagnate. So the approach was one step at a time. The first five years were very, very, very tough, but very, very, very satisfying because you came out of it. It was survival. First five years was pure survival. He knows those days. I thought we had two months, but he was the CFO. He says, though, we had one month of rent and payroll. So it was scary times, but something kept one going. I think it's a combo of left brain, right brain. Left brain is telling you numbers are moving in the right direction. Right brain is telling you the gut instinct — yeah, be creative, find innovative ways. One month at a time, one month at a time. So the tough times got over because you had a couple of people, a close team. We could bounce ideas off and share the burden. As they say, if you talk about your pain with someone, half the pain goes away. We were also having fun despite working — Mr. Narayana Murthy will be very proud — 100-hour weeks, flat out. When people say they don't want to work 70 hours in their 20s, I say seriously, you're never going to build something of your own. There was no work-life balance. None whatsoever in the early days. And it's okay. There's a time to work hard and then it gets better and better because you have other people, if you let go.

I think we got much more form and structure around 2005. We got VC money all over again. Until that time, it was angel money, our money — literally hand-to-mouth. Saif Partners, which is now called Elevation, have been just the best investors ever. 2005, 2006, we split the round between Helion and Sierra because we liked them both, and we don't know how to say no to good people. They're both lovely guys. And the Sierra gentleman is still on our board as an independent from 2006. Wow — sold out in the IPO in 2010. In this country, we want him as an independent till 2025. So Tim Guleri is sitting in the valleys there. Tiger came in in 2007 and 2008, and then we IPOed in 2010. After that, there's a lot more structure. Yes, around that time when you IPO, I think you make a very big decision, which I hope people think long and hard about — why do you want to IPO? Because an IPO is actually just base camp. An IPO is a reset to go much further. So if you don't want to build a much bigger business, then you should not IPO. It's okay — you should sell your company if you want to liquidate, or you should keep running a privately owned company. Sometimes that's great for some people. Our dreams were bigger. We needed external capital. You take external capital, means you have to give them a return. It's very simple. If you have to give them a return in that four, five, seven-year horizon, then you'll do whatever needs to be done. If you've sold an IPO dream to your people and given them pieces of paper called stock options, and you can't give them a return, then it's worthless. You have to be very careful and mindful about the verbal and formal promises — formal always, but even the verbal promises that you make — and you've got to live up to them. Because that's what we're all about: our word and our integrity.

So then, form and structure — we were very clear. By that time we were clear about the IPO. Till that time, honestly, there was a moment — I've spoken about this a bit — where just before Saif came in, we got an offer. We were down and out. We were ready to sell. There was a company called Zuji, which was half Travel Velocity and half Abacus, and they had come to meet us. Someone had told them they wanted to buy the company, and internally we discussed. We were 55% management-held, and there was no VC — just angels. Rajesh had angel-funded us, a few others had angel-funded us. If we got $10 million, we'll sell the company — $10 million then, and I guess the dollar was 48 rupees. I went into that meeting and for some reason I said, like a good Punjabi, we'll host you for lunch. Then I realized we don't even have too much money, so we went to a small restaurant called Waves near our office. For some reason, the other guys didn't come along, but I told them I'm going for this meeting, and this is the deal. We had agreed: if it's $10 million, we'll take the offer. We'll all make a few millions and we'll be fine. We're still very young — early 30s. These guys started, and it went up to seven, seven and a half, maybe eight, and it got stuck. I said, 'Thank you very much, but no thank you.' Walked back, ran back. These guys — what happened? And they knew on my face. They were relieved that we didn't get the number, and we didn't sell. I was relieved that they didn't get to 10. So in your gut, you knew you actually didn't want to, but you were almost forced to.

And I think I would have felt more miserable than ever possible seeing other companies build something which was our rightful place. So my big lesson to entrepreneurs who are onto something is: push it, make it bigger. You don't realize what one can do. Just don't sell out or don't shut down too early, because who knows what can come out of it. If you're having fun, you're making ends meet, and broadly that's okay, then defer your gratification. It'll be worth it. MakeMyTrip has built a very real, sustainable, long-term —

I honestly think we got a lot when we didn't need it, when we didn't deserve it. And I don't think this metric even matters. Most of the time, our head of comms is saying do this interview and I'm saying, 'Really, I don't think we need to do it.' I will always ask five times: do we really need to do it? Except chatting with you, which is very different. No, it didn't matter. You're saying I don't think so? Because one has got it. If you never got it, I think it matters, because you also need it as a B2C business. It helps you with raising capital, with getting talent. So you need a profile, but I think we got enough. Whether someone's getting more or less — I think the real celebration, I guess, was the IPO. We celebrated every day between 2001 and 2005 — every month that we were surviving, we really celebrated with a bottle of cheap alcohol on a barati where one of my colleagues stayed. That's what we would do, and then plan for the next month. But the real celebration was the IPO. We felt very good, but right after that we reminded ourselves: come down to earth. This is not a real moment. Because otherwise you'll keep floating. What is it at the end of the day? It's a financial milestone. It hasn't fundamentally changed anything, except you've raised capital now. In fact, the kind of pressure it puts — eight years or maybe nine years after that, flat out till COVID, Rajesh and I — out of the 36 quarters, at least one — actually both of us went for at least 32 quarters. He probably went for all 36. I went for 34 quarters for a roadshow. Grueling one week. There is no joy. Even in the IPO, they say, 'Oh wow, it's really fashionable!' and all that. You fly a private jet — the bankers make you do that nonsense. It is very, very painful. It is grueling. Morning to night. You're speaking, you're just talking the same thing. Then you catch a flight late night, sleep four hours, wake up in another city the next morning, and do the whole routine again. We did it for 10 days. On the weekend, they said, 'What do you want to do?' I think we both said, 'We want to sleep.' We just wanted to sleep because you're so exhausted. I don't think there's any great joy in all of that. The next celebration is 25 years today. So I think it's a huge one.