The Man Who Launched MakeMyTrip and Lost Everything in 48 Hours
There was a time when Deep Kalra quit. Where he went back to his banking career, told his wife it was worth a shot, and moved on. That time does not exist. But it almost did.
It was early 2000. The internet was electric. Everyone had a dot-com idea, and everyone was getting funded. Deep walked away from ABN Amro, then GE Capital, Stable jobs,Good money. His wife handed him her savings. He put in his own. Then he sat across from an investor at a mall in Mumbai and worked out a deal on a napkin. Two million dollars for two-thirds of the company.
He went back to Gurgaon and built. Sleepless nights, constant iteration. He went live on October 7, 2000.
Weeks later, the dotcom bubble burst. The investor wanted the money back.
From 2001 to 2003, the company lived on two months of cash at a time. The team shrank. The office shrank with it, from two floors of a building down to just the mezzanine. Deep stopped taking a salary entirely. His co-founders took pay cuts and accepted equity in return. Everyone who stayed, stayed on belief.
Then 9/11. Then SARS. The travel industry collapsed globally and MakeMyTrip was a travel company but he did not quit.
Deep did something most founders struggle to do. He stopped trying to be everything to everyone.He focused on a single lane: Non-Resident Indians in the US booking flights back home. That segment had credit cards. That segment trusted the internet. That was the one place the product could actually work. For five years, that narrow corridor between America and India kept MakeMyTrip alive.
Not glamorous. Not the vision. But real. In 2005, IRCTC brought online rail booking to India. Low-cost airlines arrived IndiGo, SpiceJet, Air Deccan. The middle class discovered affordable flying, and the internet was where they went to book it. Deep had spent five years building the machine for exactly this moment.
Gross merchandise value went from roughly 200 crore rupees in 2005 to approximately 4,200 crore rupees by 2010. Twenty times growth in five years, built on a foundation poured during the worst of times.
August 17, 2010. Deep Kalra rang the opening bell at NASDAQ.
The IPO was priced at 14 dollars per share. By the end of day one, it was trading at 26.45 dollars. The stock jumped 89 percent in a single session. Valuation crossed 6,600 crore rupees. First Indian internet company to list in the US in four years. Biggest single-day pop in nearly three years across any stock.
He called it a fairytale. He had earned that word.
MakeMyTrip did not stop. In 2016, it merged with Ibibo Group, bringing Goibibo and redBus under one roof and commanding over half of India's entire online travel market. TripMoney followed, handling foreign exchange and travel insurance. RedBus expanded into Southeast Asia and South America.
Then Deep did something quietly remarkable. He co-founded Ashoka University. He helped start I Am Gurgaon, a civic NGO in the city where MakeMyTrip was born. He became the person other founders come to when they want to understand how to last.
Today, MakeMyTrip carries a market cap of approximately 37,000 crore rupees. Revenue crossed 8,100 crore rupees in FY2025. Millions of Indians open that app every single day without thinking about the mezzanine office in Gurgaon where it all nearly ended.
Deep Kalra tells every founder the same thing, "No great company has been built very quickly. It takes ten years to become something. So be patient. Don't look back for the first four to five years.”
He was not speaking in theory. He lived two months at a time, for five straight years, waiting for India to be ready.