Vijay Sharma’s moment of revelation came in October 2011 as he watched Alibaba’s Jack Ma give a talk in Hong Kong. The young Indian entrepreneur knew little of Mr Ma’s business empire, which was well on the way to becoming the world’s largest ecommerce company. Yet he was enraptured as Mr Ma talked about the scale of his operations, and explained how he had seen off a range of American competitors, not least online auction site eBay.
“I did not know my life would change at that conference,” Mr Sharma says. He was struggling to build a digital payments company that would let Indians buy cinema tickets or settle utility bills using their mobile phones. It was the latest in a series of modestly successful technology ventures, but growth was frustratingly slow.
“When you are born in India, you are mesmerised by size, and you hope you’ll some day build a service that hundreds of millions of Indians want to use,” says 35-year-old Mr Sharma. “So when I heard ‘half a billion people’, when I heard him talking about ‘building a $100bn business’, I was like — wow!”