How karate helped a shy kid transform how India pays

**Rahul Tandon** (0:01)
From a shy kid doing karate to building one of India's biggest fintech companies.

**Harshil Mathur** (0:06)
I would have met at least 100-ish bankers trying to get a bank to approve us. The reason I was getting rejected is because we came from no finance background.

**Rahul Tandon** (0:13)
That's Harshil Mathur, founder of Razorpay, here on Business Daily, from the BBC World Service.
I'm Rahul Tandon, and I'm excited to bring you this next interview, because Harshil Mathur's story is one that genuinely fascinates me. Here's a man who grew up as a shy, middle-class kid in Jaipur doing karate to build confidence, who got laughed out of bank boardrooms and still managed to build one of India's top fintech companies valued at $7.5 billion. His journey runs parallel with India's own transformation from a cash-only economy to one that now processes more digital payments than anywhere else on the planet. Anyway, let's get into it. Hey, how are you doing?

**Harshil Mathur** (1:07)
Hey, hi.

**Rahul Tandon** (1:08)
Where are you? Which city are you in today?

**Harshil Mathur** (1:10)
We are in Bangalore.

**Rahul Tandon** (1:12)
Bangalore traffic city.

**Harshil Mathur** (1:14)
Bangalore traffic is very popular.

**Rahul Tandon** (1:16)
There must be moments even in your busy day where you stop and pinch yourself and go, wow.

**Harshil Mathur** (1:24)
Really?
I think it happens once in a while. Of course, there are moments we celebrate when the teams achieve something, when you close a large merchant that you always wanted. I think when some of those things happen, it just feels wow. For example, I can tell you that recently I was booking travel to somewhere in Vietnam. I was making a payment and went to Airbnb, and the entire checkout was through Razorpay. It felt wow because Airbnb is such a massive global brand name. For Razorpay to achieve that scale where today we are powering almost all payments for Airbnb from India, I think that impact feels amazing. But honestly, where we are today, of course, I couldn't have imagined at all.

**Rahul Tandon** (2:05)
So how do you get to that point is the question, I'm sure many people sitting at home won't answer. So if we go back to your childhood, and just to tell people, you grew up in Jaipur, in Rajasthan. It's not one of the huge Indian cities, it's not a Mumbai or a Bengaluru where you are now.

**Harshil Mathur** (2:26)
Yeah, I know it is a smaller town. So I grew up in an average middle-class family. My dad used to work in a bank. My mom was stay at home, worked as a beautician. So I had a very fairly normal childhood. I mean, I was always a slightly shy child.
I mean, I was naughty, but...

**Rahul Tandon** (2:44)
Gone. What did you used to do that was naughty?

**Harshil Mathur** (2:48)
I used to have fun with friends.
I would hang out a lot after school and chill with folk people. So I had my fair share of fun, but in the classes and everything else, I was fairly shy. So sometimes I meet my class teachers after school, and they say, we can't imagine you doing an interview like this, or you speaking publicly on stage and all of those things. So I would never do any class participation, I would never speak up or do stage shows or all of those things that people participated in. Debates, any kind of stage activity, I was very scared of stage.

**Rahul Tandon** (3:23)
Where did some of the confidence come from that you have now, that we can hear you in your voice, and the fact that you've been so successful, you have to believe in yourself to be able to achieve that. You did karate as a kid, was that an important part of growing up for you? Did that give you some confidence?

**Harshil Mathur** (3:41)
It did help. So karate, I'll say, more than confidence, it gave me discipline. So I got into karate from very early days, then old time became a black belt, and then I actually fought in nationals in India and got a silver medal. But I think the reason that karate helped, and my dad really wanted me to do karate, he used to do it himself, was that it really builds discipline. What you really learn in karate is that, how do you stay calm once you get punched in the face, literally?
I think some way that is helpful when you're building a startup, because building a company is like getting punched in the face, maybe not literally, but metaphorically almost every day. Yeah, my mom never wanted me to do karate. Once I got in a championship and I came back with a bloody nose and all that, and my mom wanted me to stop it completely. Similarly, there used to be this karate demonstrations once a year.