Mr. Ashish Kashyap invaded the e-commerce strata with ideas like as Goibibo.com (travel), Tradus.com (online shopping), PayU India (Payment gateway) and the number one casual gaming platform - ibibo games. Prior to launching ibibo group in India, Ashish was the Country Head of Google India, wherein he set up the domestic business operations from ground up. Before joining Google, Ashish "founded" E-Commerce businesses at Indiatimes.com and drove them to a profitable and scalable position. At Times Group, he architected first of its kind "Reverse Auctions" platform called "Tell Your Price"; created India's first "Travel Auction" platform and also launched 'fixed price market places'. Ashish holds an Economics Honors degree from University Of Delhi, India and an International Masters in Practicing Management (IMPM) from Insead, Fontainebleau, France.

Mr. Ashish launched ibibo's payments unit - PayU to drive enhanced conversions for Goibibo and then later provided the platform to thousands of third party merchants, which was hived off to Naspers global payments unit in January 2014.

Tradus is already one of the top ranked shopping apps on Android, Windows and iOs. But Mr Ashish says, "Tradus is still a small experiment amongst various projects. This is the usual culture of our company. Always run small and many experiments." Ashish has driven the acquisition of redBus.in, a significant milestone in the evolution of Indian internet industry.

Ibibo started as a social network in 2007, then pivoted into games, and again into e-commerce and transactions. On asking Ashish about the fields he is going to introduce further, he says, "In the first year or so we experimented with lots of products and services. It was a green field operation."

Experimentation, trial and error is the key tenant of building internet businesses. Goibibo.com too was an experiment which grew very fast. Post that Ashish and his team has expanded into various online travel services by both building and acquiring (example redBus). "Since 2009, we have only focussed in the truncations and online travel space. And we will continue to do so. We have scaled online travel assets like Goibibo, redBus, YourBus and TBOGroup. This makes us a clear leader in this space. Going forward we will continue to expand in this category itself," mentions Ashish.

One of the major challenge faced by him in these 7 years of his journey is to pivot from a social network to an e-commerce/ online travel group.

The key things he learnt at Goggle which helped him in this journey of ibibo are:
1) Robust hiring Process
2) De-centralizing / creation of PODs for faster execution.

He loves his job because it allows him to create innovative applications ; solve problems for customers and partners by leveraging internet and mobile.

Mr. Kashyap always knew he will be part of the creator ecosystem. He says, "I don't like doing jobs in a boxed environment." He loves being around technology and few of his close-to-heart gadgets are Apple TV, iPhone, Kindle, MacBook. Being a CEO and having great responsibilities Mr. Ashish tries to balance his personal and professional life and tries to keep his team and family happy.
His thought on opportunities and problems is: Opportunities require solving problems. And I enjoy problems. The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari is the book that has left a powerful impact on his life. "My story mainly revolves around the idea and thought I believe in execution and not being scared of failures," says Ashish.

Mr. Kashyap's advice to young aspiring entrepreneurs is, "Define the problem that you want to solve, Create a clear plan to solve, Develop a minimal Viable project, Execute, Execute, If it does not work : Fail fast! If it works: iterate fast, Always choose the right team/ partners.

Surrounding yourself with an excellent team ; percolating the clear objectives ; rewarding execution and action ; honesty (Doing the right thing) are the factors to be taken care of for making a company reach its best and deliver what it aims for.