Kanika Tekriwal founded JetSetGo, an India-based private jet concierge service that links passengers to planes through an online marketplace. She defied the odds first by breaking into a male-dominated profession as a woman and again by starting the company in 2013 after a bout with cancer. She went into aviation because of a passion for the profession since age 16.
Kanika wanted to build a charter aircraft business using an aggregator model like Ola and Uber. Around the year 2013, she set up Jetsetgo as an aircraft aggregator, with an initial investment of just ₹5,600. First, she built an app to book chartered flights, and then for the next two years, she took advances from clients and credit from vendors to run the business.
Her company Jetsetgo Aviation Services Private Limited has gradually grown into a massive Rs 150-crore company, having handled 1 lakh flyers and operated 6,000 flights in 2020-21. Her clients are mostly corporates, celebrities, politicians, and people of importance.
Kanika has been placed on numerous coveted lists such as Forbes’ 30 Under 30, CNN’s 20 Under 40, BBC’s 100 Most Inspiring Women in the World, and a YGL with the World Economic Forum. While her biggest victory after surviving cancer can be that JetSetGo has shown seven-fold growth and holds an excellent EBITDA as well, Kanika revels much more in the smaller victories, such as receiving excellent customer feedback or repairing a plane in record time. She has also believed that her self belief is her success mantra, besides believing in the power of the mind. After all, if you believe it, you can do it.
Despite reaching the top of the ladder, not every day is a celebration for Kanika. Self-motivation is her mantra on days things aren’t rosy. She says, “Some days are really hard, on some days I wake up to news about some issue with an aircraft, bad weather, customers screaming, catering gone wrong. Sadly, these days happen very frequently, at least three to four days a month. But while it can get difficult to get out of bed, I know I have to keep going and put on a smile. It takes a lot of self-motivation where I remind myself that I’m doing this because I love it and that I want to change the world.”
