Kanika Tekriwal: A Woman Who Owns 10 Private Jets At The Age Of 32
MS.KANIKA TEKRIWAL
Meet Kanika Tekriwal, founder of JetSetGo, a plane aggregator startup that operates, manages, and flies chartered planes and helicopters for owners. Also called the Uber of the Indian skies, JetSetGo's journey began in the year 2012 with an aim of making private flying more accessible, transparent, economical, and efficient to everyone.There was even a time when I wanted to become a pilot,” laughs Tekriwal. Well, she may not have become a pilot, but now, she manages India’s largest aircraft fleet.
"There was even a time when I wanted to become a pilot",
laughs Tekriwal. Well, she may not have become a pilot,
but now, she manages India’s largest aircraft fleet."
An entrepreneur who is a relentless pursuer of hope, positivity and drive – Ms. Kanika Tekriwal was not only chosen as one of the 100 most inspirational women in the world by BBC but also recognized by Forbes Asia as one of the 30 under 30 leading entrepreneurs in Asia amongst various other accolades.. Her energy is infectious and compels everyone around her strive for even greater success. A marathon runner, a painter, a traveler and more – she is redefining her life every day.
Journey as an Entrepreneur
Ms. Kanika Tekriwal started her journey in the aviation industry at the age of 17. During her tenure, she has seen the industry grow and has grown with it. It is well and truly safe to assume that she has learnt more than a thing or two about the industry in this time.
As her career unfolded, she saw the frustration suffered by any customer in regard to chartering planes or helicopters. The industry was clouded by charter brokers and operators who were more interested in their commission than satisfying their customers. The absence of a technology driven platform in the private aviation industry led to a lack of transparency and astronomical prices for the same. The demand for “something better” was the spark that led her to create “A professional and comprehensive technology driver charter service providing a variety of aircrafts with a transparent pricing system”
JetSetGo is a direct result of the desire to solve this problem. It is a customer-centric venture aimed at revolutionizing the private aviation business in the region by re-defining the experience for private charter customers.
Dream takes shape
The 29-year-old says she was raised in a “traditional Marwari household.” “I grew up learning how to fill out cheques and use a typewriter and sat down for discussions with people who handled finance in dad’s business,” she says.
With a spark in her eyes, she says her father was always keen on making her understand finance. While she was making plans of becoming an entrepreneur, her parents were keener on teaching her the basics to be the perfect life-partner to a businessman husband. They wanted her to get educated and marry into a rich family.
Tekriwal was sent to study at the Lawrence Public School in Ooty when she was seven. She was two years younger than her classmates because she had skipped kindergarten. “I grew up very fast, and more than anything else, it taught me survival,” Tekriwal adds. However, at the boarding school, Tekriwal also found solace. Students were encouraged to pursue cultural and extra-curricular activities, and Tekriwal saw her passion in painting develop gradually. At one point, she thought she could be better in arts, in painting and designing in particular, rather than business.
But her time at the school was cut short. After her ninth standard, Tekriwal’s parents shifted her back to their hometown, Bhopal. It was not an easy move, particularly because her new school, the Jawaharlal Nehru Senior Secondary School, was deeply academic. Tekriwal’s world had turned upside down with her expected to learn housekeeping, a skill considered necessary for a daughter.
She did try to fit in, pursuing her graduation in economics, alongside a diploma in visual communication and designing, from Mumbai. But, by the end of her college days, Tekriwal knew both subjects would have to take a backseat. She was intent on pursuing business studies, and went to London to get her MBA from Coventry University. “I started working when I was barely 17 years old. While I was in college, I worked with Aerospace Resources in business development, at Coventry, and seized the potential for the charter market in India,” says Tekriwal.
By now, Tekriwal knew that India direly needed something like JetSetGo.
While in London, she had seen many such services that were thriving and
had even worked in one. In 2011, she returned to Bhopal to set up her
company, brimming with certainty, when tragedy struck.
Challenges Faced
Obstacles build character; this cannot be more true for the life on an entrepreneur. Ms. Tekriwal, like most entrepreneurs faced a plethora of obstacles before she was able to achieve the success she has achieved today. She started the company with a 100 dollars and is now doing over 7 digit turnover every month. At the very beginning, after investing over six months and a considerable amount of resources, she was not able to sell a single plane. She could’ve lost faith in the lackluster economy and given up but instead she chose to ride out the storm and innovate. She looked for ways to create a business model that reduced the price of these planes and made them more feasible for any potential customers. It was this thinking that paved the path to her becoming one of the 100 most prominent and inspirational women in the world.
At 22, she had been diagnosed with stage-2 Hodgkins Lymphoma.
She recovered from it with renewed vigour, but her parents had become even more protective of her. They refused to support her plan to shift to Delhi, to start JetSetGo. “My father stopped talking to me for quite some time. They thought I was not physically strong and that Delhi was not safe. I tried to make them understand, but my business idea was too unfamiliar. Initially, dad thought I was making a phone game,” Tekriwal says.
Tekriwal put her foot down and moved, starting her venture in 2014. Her friends were always supportive of her plan to set up the “Uber of the skies.” Tekriwal stayed at a friend’s house in the beginning, as she wasscared of living alone in the capital city. “I never knew what jahaz meant before coming to Delhi, I had always said plane. Now I keep saying jahaz all the time, and can’t say plane anymore,” she quips.
She got down to work immediately, learning a range of skills — from the language to understanding how the system worked for the plane operators. Tekriwal had rounds of discussions with various stakeholders, for a deeper understanding of the sector and of the troubles they face. By the end of these, she had managed to convince a few to hire her services and, in eight months, her company had won the contract to manage 20 planes and had hired a team for each aircraft. “From taking the calls to dispatching the plane, in the first six months, it was only me doing every single thing,” she recalls.
Self Belief – My Success Mantra
“I have always believed in the power of the mind – If you believe it,
you can do it. The events one face in their lifetime are nothing but a
reciprocation of a combination of their thoughts and actions. If you
think, you believe and are determined to do something; your actions
automatically work towards achieving it.”
Uniqueness of Business Model
Often referred to as the Uber of the skies, JetSetGo provides charter customers with choice, transparency and the flexibility of booking on both web and mobile platforms. JetSetGo prioritizes the needs of its customers by providing exclusive ground services, state of the art planes and helicopters and unmatched service all around. Having India’s largest private jet fleet at its disposal, JetSetGo offers the shortest wait time for an aircraft and, in the rare case of unscheduled maintenance it has the unrivaled ability to provide you with a substitute aircraft in the shortest amount of time. For single leg trips, through its online demand aggregation model it maximizes the chance for the sale of empty travel legs to other customers at attractive price points, thereby giving credit to original customer against the overall cost of the charter.
To enable all of this and leveraging technology optimally, JetSetGo provides a cloud based enterprise management tool for aircraft operators which combines scheduling, advanced trip pricing and business intelligence capabilities with an in-built global market place for services and parts that will soon also have transactional capabilities. On the ground through long term strategic alliances and investments JetSetGo has ramped up its capabilities in several Indian airports to put in motion a new JetSetGo customer service standard that will forever re-define the customer experience by providing far superior level of service than that currently exists in the country.
More about her
Tekriwal, an M.B.A. graduate, co-founded her company with her friend Sudheer Perla. Born in an orthodox Marwari family, her father was running a real estate and chemical business. Kanika got a boarding school education in South India. She later moved to Mumbai for her under-graduation in economics and a diploma in design.
Her vision
With the 'SMART' management technique, maintenance prevention, and prediction technologies, the startup offers safety and on-time arrival like never before. Kanika envisions to tap the third dimension — the sky — to its fullest potential, and make chartered air travel the future of transport for Indians who value time and convenience.
“We are looking to democratise air travel,” adds Kanika.
