"There is no giving up": OYO's Ritesh Agarwal on small-town founders

OYO founder Ritesh Agarwal has one message for India's small-town entrepreneurs: "There is no giving up."

Agarwal delivered the remark in an exclusive conversation with Chandra R. Srikanth at the Startup Conclave. The comments, released under a #WATCH banner, put the hotel-chain founder's weight behind a cohort he argues is too often underestimated: founders building companies outside India's major metropolitan hubs.

Agarwal, who founded OYO and built it into one of India's most closely watched hospitality companies, said entrepreneurs from small towns often have a deeper sense of gratitude than their big-city counterparts, according to the exchange at the conclave.

That gratitude, in his telling, is not a soft sentiment. It is fuel. It shapes how small-town founders approach the long, uneven work of building a company — the setbacks, the capital constraints, the distance from established investor networks.

Agarwal speaks on this subject with authority earned firsthand. He launched OYO as a young founder from Odisha, not from the boardrooms of Mumbai or Bengaluru, and scaled the company through years of aggressive expansion, sharp retrenchment and public scrutiny. His own trajectory tracks the argument he made on stage: origin matters less than staying power.

The setting sharpened the message. The Startup Conclave, where Srikanth conducted the interview, convenes founders and investors to take stock of India's entrepreneurial economy. Agarwal used his slot to focus not on OYO's operations but on the character of the people building the next wave of Indian companies.

His core claim is straightforward. Entrepreneurs from small towns, he said, bring a depth of gratitude — and, with it, a refusal to quit — that sustains them through conditions founders elsewhere might not tolerate. "There is no giving up," he said.

The comment lands at a moment when India's startup ecosystem is debating where its next generation of durable companies will come from. Venture capital has concentrated heavily in a handful of metros, even as founders, talent and consumer demand spread far beyond them. Agarwal's framing pushes back on the assumption that serious company-building requires a metropolitan address.

For OYO's founder, the grit of small-town entrepreneurs is not a story of overcoming odds for its own sake. It is a competitive fact. Founders who feel gratitude for the opportunity, and who treat quitting as a non-option, simply keep building longer — through downturns, funding winters and operational grind.

The interview adds Agarwal's voice to a broader conversation about the geographic widening of Indian entrepreneurship. As capital, infrastructure and digital distribution reach deeper into the country's tier-two and tier-three towns, the founders already there — the ones Agarwal describes — are positioned to define the ecosystem's next chapter.

Whether investors move as fast as the founders Agarwal is championing remains the open question his comments set up.