Loyalty pays, and Shyam Kumar is proof.

When Mumbai-based mobile wallet startup Citrus Pay was sold last year to PayU, the payments subsidiary of South Africa’s Naspers, it made a millionaire out of many of its staff members—including one low-level employee who had been with the company since its inception in 2010.

After his father fell ill with tuberculosis, Kumar had to support his brothers and sisters, but the school-dropout couldn’t get a steady job. Kumar’s brother, who worked as a driver in Mumbai, asked his banker boss to help Kumar out. The boss was a close friend of Citrus Pay founder Jitendra Gupta at a time when e-commerce players were setting up shop in the country. After a meeting with Gupta, Kumar bagged a job running errands around the workplace.

#India