Omio's Naren Shaam to founders: go global early, grind for years

Omio operates in 56 countries, and its founder says that scale came from entering 30 of them within the first three or four years — against everyone's advice. Naren Shaam, Founder and CEO of Omio Group, laid out that playbook at TechSparks 2026, where he told founders to skip the slow, win-your-home-market-first orthodoxy and expand early.

"If I were to rebuild Omio today, I would start here because there is so much growth and opportunity in India today. But the principles remain the same. You need to go after really hard problems and focus on solving them for a very long time," he told YourStory.

Shaam founded Omio after spotting a structural flaw in global transportation: train, bus and ferry operators each ran separate systems, with no unified way for travelers to book across them. After moving to Germany, he spent two and a half years working on the supply side before the company shipped its first product. That's roughly 30 months of unglamorous infrastructure work before a single customer saw anything.

What does that mean for timeline expectations?

Shaam's message on timelines is blunt. "Building a billion-dollar business is really hard. The stories of companies going from zero to a billion dollars very quickly are rare. Don't get inspired by the exceptions as for most, it is a daily grind," he said.

His global-first argument is sector-specific. Local-need businesses can stay local, but he pointed to education, healthcare and deeptech as categories where the problem statement is global from day one. Omio's own expansion proves the cost of the bet: it required heavy capital and plenty of mistakes to correct. Still, he believes that early international push probably made Omio the company it is today.

Has AI changed the calculus?

Partly. Shaam recalls that when Omio expanded in Germany, it employed around 30 people just to handle translations. AI does that work now — one concrete example of how international expansion has gotten cheaper.

But cheaper barriers cut both ways. If you can build a product fast, so can competitors. Shaam frames the shift as a move from execution risk to selection risk.

"The onus moves from bias to action to judgement: what should I focus on? Which industry has a bigger moat? What will that moat look like 10 years from now? Starting is easy now but choosing what to pursue and committing to it is the hard part," he said.

Will AI agents rewrite travel distribution?

Maybe, but not quickly. Shaam said AI agents could reshape digital commerce, including how people book travel. The catch is economics: consumers need these agents to be very cheap before they penetrate the market, and there's a cost barrier plus a business-model problem to solve. "I see this as a major transformation and not an overnight event," he explained.

His second caution is operational. Even if agents handle the booking, the physical world still has to deliver.

"Real life happens outside the internet. If an agent buys something or orders food, people need to trust that it will arrive every single time. Businesses that can solve these operational problems at scale will have something valuable to build on," he said.

The advice underneath it all

For aspiring founders, Shaam's closing point strips away the founder-branding appeal. Don't become an entrepreneur simply because you want the title. "This is a journey with long periods of darkness, and you need to be passionate enough about what you're solving to keep going," he said.

For practitioners, the takeaway is a sequencing one: pick a genuinely hard problem with a durable moat, commit to it for years — not quarters — and treat global expansion as a day-one decision if your market is already global. The grind, Shaam suggests, isn't a bug in the system. It's the system.