Falguni Nayar and Vijay Shekhar Sharma: What India’s New-Age Founders Did Differently
Falguni Nayar founded Nykaa at 50, after two decades running IPOs for other companies at Kotak Mahindra. Vijay Shekhar Sharma founded Paytm only after two earlier ventures nearly ruined him financially. Their paths couldn’t look more different — but both point to the same underlying lesson about when and how to start.
Falguni Nayar: Starting Late Isn’t Starting Behind
Nayar spent nearly 20 years as Managing Director of Kotak Mahindra Capital, advising major Indian companies on IPOs and growth strategy, before founding Nykaa in 2012 at age 50. Rather than treating her corporate career as a closed chapter, she used it directly — her deep understanding of capital markets and business scaling became a genuine competitive advantage as a first-time founder, not a disadvantage of starting ‘late.’
Nykaa opened its first physical store in 2014, launched a private label in 2015, reached unicorn status in 2020, and went public in 2021 — making Nayar a self-made billionaire at 58. By 2023, the company had reached 24 million customers.
The lesson: the years you spend building expertise somewhere else aren’t a delay before your ‘real’ venture — they’re often exactly what makes the eventual venture work.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma: Two Failures Before the Success
Sharma’s first venture, XS Corps, attempted to build an Indian search engine at age 19 and failed for lack of resources, though a pivot to content management led to a $1 million sale in 1999. His second venture, One97 Communications, ran into severe cash flow problems when telecom operators delayed payments — by 2003, Sharma was broke and taking repair jobs to survive, eventually selling a 40% stake for just ₹8 lakh.
The turning point wasn’t a business insight — it was personal. A rejected loan application for his father revealed to him how much of India’s financial system simply wasn’t built for ordinary people. That realisation, not a market analysis, is what redirected him toward building Paytm, launched in 2010 around mobile recharges before expanding into payments, and accelerated dramatically after demonetisation in 2016 brought QR-code payments to street vendors nationwide.
The lesson: what looked like 16 years of failure was actually 16 years of learning exactly what problem was worth solving — the eventual success wasn’t sudden, it was compounding.
The Shared Thread
Neither founder started with a clean, obvious idea from day one. Nayar’s advantage came from staying in one field long enough to deeply understand it before switching sides from advisor to founder. Sharma’s came from surviving repeated failure long enough to find the problem that actually mattered to him. Neither path is faster or better than the other — but both suggest that the ‘right time to start’ is less about age or perfect timing, and more about whether you’ve genuinely understood the problem you’re solving.
Frequently Asked Questions
At what age did Falguni Nayar start Nykaa?
She founded Nykaa in 2012 at age 50, after nearly two decades in investment banking at Kotak Mahindra Capital.
Did Vijay Shekhar Sharma succeed on his first attempt?
No — his first two ventures (XS Corps and the early years of One97 Communications) both ran into serious financial and operational difficulty before Paytm, launched in 2010, became a success.
What’s the practical takeaway for someone starting a business later in life?
Falguni Nayar’s story suggests that deep expertise built over years in one field, even outside entrepreneurship, can become a genuine competitive advantage rather than a delay — starting later isn’t the same as starting behind.
