'Most of us slept in the office': MakeMyTrip founder Deep Kalra recollects early days' hustle

Stumbling from one job to the other, late-night ideating, and getting some financial help from his spouse enabled Deep Kalra to found his travel company MakeMyTrip, now one of the most popular and sought-after online travel companies. Talking about the company’s early days, Kalra said that an unwitting plan of distress management buyout, helped keep the company afloat during the trying times.

Kalra, speaking at The SenseAI Podcast with Raja Gopalakrishnan and Devika Khandelwal, said that it was really the early struggling days of MakeMyTrip before it began its exponential growth that really defined the company. “By 2005 we were doing really well…the crazy growth was from 2005 to 2010…when we grew 25x. It was really fantastic but it was really those few years that defined what we are and I still have some of the guys with me from the beginning which I think has made all the difference because they feel for the company in a very, very different way. Also, when we IPOed, I must add, 75 per cent of our staff had stocks in the company…so I really felt very good about that,” he said.

The struggle Kalra speaks about came a year after the company raised $2 million in 2000 from e.ventures. But less than a year later they wanted the money back because the dotcom bust hit India, 9/11 occurred, and the SARS outbreak had happened too. “That was a triple whammy in our business…the real entrepreneurship and the real rubber hit the road in 2001,” said Kalra, adding that he had to decide to pay everyone a couple of months’ salary and pack up or make a fight of it.

“I did what I later learnt was called a distress management buyout…I didn’t know it then, I was just doing what I could,” he said. Kalra said they were given the option of shutting down the company or buying them out. “I said, ‘guys I have Rs 46 lakh’, and that’s it, and they said ‘deal’. And I walked out feeling like an idiot…I could have offered them a fraction of that amount!” said Kalra.

He said that although MakeMyTrip had a few angel investors backing them, it was the following two years that really were full of struggle. Many top executives took pay cuts and were eventually made co-founders. Senior employees were given pay cuts and junior employees were offered no raises. Some of the top employees drawing large pay-cheques left the company, which brought down the cash burn, said Kalra. Most of the employees at that point slept in the office, said Kalra, adding that they relocated from a nice office to a mezzanine one in Okhla Phase 1. When MakeMyTrip eventually emerged from that period, they started making money, Kalra recalled.

Not only were MakeMyTrip’s early days replete with obstacles, Kalra himself faced many roadblocks on his way to setting up the company.

The MakeMyTrip founder said that he had no entrepreneurial background; his father was in the private sector and his mother was a teacher. As a student, Kalra was set to do engineering. He got through BITS Pilani and Delhi College of Engineering (now Delhi Technological University), but opted to pursue Economics in St Stephen’s College, Delhi University.

Kalra began his career as a banker at ABN Amro before he figured out that banking was not really his cup of tea. “I was itching to do something different, so I interviewed for various jobs,” said Kalra, adding that he wanted to go as far away from banking as possible, and decided that marketing of real products is what he wanted to explore.

Ajay Banga, President of World Bank, who worked with PepsiCo at that point, offered a job to Kalra at Pepsi Foods in India, he revealed. Kalra had also gotten a job with US clothing brand, Arrow, that had just entered India, but he took a job with AMF Bowling, world leaders in setting up bowling alleys. AMF Bowling was setting up their India office and were looking for an individual to become the India rep. “It wasn’t easy because it was very real-estate intensive, but I learnt streetsmarts doing that job,” said Kalra.

It was still not the beginning of his entrepreneurial journey, Kalra said. He went on to join GE Capital as a VP after AMF Bowling. “I tried pretty hard to get the internet into what we did…so GEIndia.com… and we got $1 million for the project but very quickly we realised that it was just a weekend project and that our bread and butter came from finance,” said Kalra, who left the company in 16 months.

It was Kalra’s uncanny interest in the internet that finally nudged him into entrepreneurship. “I worked pretty hard at it for 4-5 months getting sure…the nights were really spent doing this,” said Kalra. He put all his savings and his wife gave him her savings too to start MakeMyTrip. MakeMyTrip managed to raise early-stage finance and was one of the last companies to get funded before the dotcom bust.

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