No English, Class 9 pass: Hyderabad startup’s cab driver hire pays off

Hyderabad: A city-based startup founder’s LinkedIn post about hiring a 9th-pass taxi driver with no English-speaking skills as his company’s first employee a decade ago has gone viral, drawing widespread praise online for what commenters are calling an example of leadership beyond credentials.

Sravanth Gajula, co-founder of digital out-of-home advertising firm AdOnMo and a former Microsoft employee, wrote that he hired the driver in Hyderabad ten years ago despite the man having only graduated from class 9 and having no command of English and no corporate background. Gajula said the decision baffled people around him at the time, but he was drawn to what he described as the driver’s hunger and honesty rather than his paper qualifications.

According to the post, AdOnMo enrolled the driver in spoken English classes and gave him substantive work rather than symbolic tasks, betting on his potential rather than treating the hire as a one-off gesture of goodwill.

A decade later, Gajula wrote that the employee now heads procurement at AdOnMo with pan-India responsibility and is reportedly among the most trusted people in the organisation.

Gajula used the story to make a wider point about corporate culture, arguing that genuine people-first values show up in decisions such as hiring someone conventional hiring processes would overlook, and investing in employees before they appear “ready.” He ended the post urging other founders and leaders to believe more expansively in their teams’ potential.

A separate account of the same hire, shared by another AdOnMo employee as part of a founder-interview series, adds detail to the origin story. Gajula reportedly first met the driver while testing an early prototype of AdOnMo’s advertising technology in a taxi, and the driver was the only one willing to let him experiment with it in his cab over several weeks before being offered a job.

The post has drawn a wave of appreciation in the comments, with several users describing it as a rare example of a company backing potential over pedigree, and praising Gajula for investing in an employee before his abilities were visible on paper.

Founded in 2016, AdOnMo operates a network of over 30,000 digital screens across malls, residential buildings and commercial spaces in more than a dozen Indian cities, and counts Zomato and Ant Financial’s Bace Capital among its backers.