Sabina Chopra, co-founder of Yatra.com, is no stranger to overcoming challenges

In 2005, the internet and starting up were not seen as glamorous. Sabina Chopra left her cushy corporate job to start her own company. Chopra, co-founder of Yatra.com, laughs, "I thought I would have more time to spend with my family.

Sabina Chopra, co-founder of Yatra.com, can traverse any difficult path to reach her destination

The year was 2005 when the internet and starting up were not considered glamorous. Sabina Chopra decided to quit her cushy corporate job and start her own company. “I thought I would have more time with my family. But, that proved to be a misconception,” laughs Chopra, co-founder of Yatra.com.

She recalls how frantic it was. “I was constantly traveling all over the country, tying up with hotels and negotiating with partners. I actually never saw my family during the first year. In fact, we had no Sunday offs in the initial three years,” she recounts.

Clearly, it wasn’t an ideal situation, more so for a mother and wife. But, there was a gold pot on the other side of this hustle. A solid online travel agency, now listed on the Nasdaq.

Turbulent Take-Off

The entrepreneurial plunge was totally unplanned for Chopra. She grew up in Delhi, started her career in travel space, fell in love with an army man, and married him. She had successful stints at Japan Airways, Canadian Airlines, and Ebookers — a UK-based online travel portal. Life was smooth but unexciting.

One day, she received a phone call from her colleagues at Ebookers — Dhruv Shringi and Manish Amin. They wanted to start an online travel agency in India and asked her to join them. “At first, I wasn’t really sure. But, I took a step back and thought — Why can’t I do this? If it doesn’t work out, I can always go back to my corporate life,” she recalls.

So, she set out on this new journey. From a chic office cabin, Chopra was now working from cafés with an old laptop. “I went from the corporate world, where all my expenses were taken care of, to buying my own coffee and having no office space. It was really anticlimactic,” she says with a smile. For the first few months, the trio would work on models wherever they could find a place to sit.

And, the challenges were not only limited to a lack of facilities, the market itself was not completely ready for the product. At the time, the travel industry was running completely on an offline model. “When we talked to the airlines and the hotels, and told them that we would take their services online, there was a sense of reluctance. They didn’t believe us,” says Chopra. To make matters worse, broadband penetration in India was in its nascent stages, and the website had to be made lighter so that it could be accessed everywhere.

Life Support

In the pursuit of dealing with all these challenges and scaling up the company, Chopra was hardly able to give any time to her two daughters. “Sometimes, I used to feel guilty,” she says.

So, how was this taken care of? Years before starting the online travel portal, Chopra had to take a sabbatical from her career for five years, to raise the two girls. Her husband, Aadesh Chopra, would have remote postings, and there was no other way the kids could be raised.

“I really thought I had given up on my career and had moved along. But, something inside me kept burning,” she says. Eventually, with support from her mother and her husband, she was able to go back to work.

During the crazy years of starting Yatra, this settled support system at home proved enormously helpful to her. By then, Aadesh had left the Army and set up his own business. He encouraged Chopra to work towards her dreams. “My.

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