The Indian Startup Superstars


#11 Deep Kalra:

MakeMyTrip Limited is an Indian e-commerce travel agency, one out of every twelve domestic flights from India were booked through it in 2009. This travel booking startup was founded by Deep Kalra on 1st April 2000.

Deep graduated from the IIM-A in 1992, after which he had brief stints working with ABN Amro Bank and GE Money. Like most entrepreneurs, Deep was bitten by a lack of sense of personal achievement in a corporate job. Therefore, he set out to pursue his real passion – Travel. Deep came up with makemyTrip.com which allowed people to book flight tickets online without any premium and the business took off from there on hence and with the entry of low cost airlines in 2004, his timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Makemytrip.com has become one of the largest travel companies with a sales turnover of Rs 550 crore in 2006-07 alone.

#10 Kishore Biyani:

Kishore Biyani is the CEO of Future group and the Managing Director of Pantaloons. Kishore Biyani is known among the market giants as a man who sticks to his gut feeling and acts upon it and that is how he started off his grand career. Some ideas worked out better than others but a lot of them also failed miserably.

What makes Biyani a man true to his mettle is his willingness to adopt change. When he saw that his ideas were not generating enough revenue and worse, when his sales plunged and got drier than ever in September 2008, the year of The Great Recession, Biyani hired professionals and handed over operations that he took care of personally before. "That time was different. Now, we perfect something and then roll it out," he said at an interview. He hunkered down for the next 18 months, mobilized his troops to slash costs, slimmed down his portfolio and brought his business back to the forefront.

Kishore Biyani is a true example of a man whose undying perseverance and willingness to prevail beat the odds like The Great Depression and sustain to reach the top of the market that is called the Future Group.

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