Infosys, the early years
On finishing his term at IIT, Bombay in 1978, Nandan did not, as was the practice then, try and find himself a job abroad – something he attributes to sheer inertia. He did consider applying for an MBA course, but even that fell through when he was taken ill on the eve of the IIM entrance exam.
Instead, Nandan walked into the offices of the Mumbai-based Patni Computer Systems to try and find a job there. He was interviewed by N.R. Narayana Murthy – the rapport was immediate and Murthy hired the young engineer right away; neither suspected at the time that the relationship would last long, and get etched in India’s corporate history.
“What attracted me to Patni was the fact that software was a sunrise industry in those days. The ’70s was the era of the mini-computer. In 1977, IBM had left India and the market seemed to be going through some sort of churn. It was an industry that was expected to grow rapidly. I was excited at the prospect of working at Patni with Murthy at the helm,” he recounts.
Three years later, in 1981, Murthy walked out of Patni following a dis-agreement with one of the Patni brothers – and naturally, his entire division walked out with him. “He (Murthy) had extraordinary leadership skills and the entire division hero-worshipped him”, says Nandan.
The defectors decided to start their own company with Murthy in the lead – the company, of course, was Infosys, and this decision effectively re-wrote the story of the Indian software industry. There were a lot of apprehensions about the future – “India was then a closed economy, with many foreign exchange restrictions, and the telecom infrastructure was not good. Venture capital was unheard of, and the risks were enormous,” recalls Nandan.
Nandan’s brother Vijay talks about his initial doubts, “I was very skeptical of his (Nandan’s) plans to move to Bangalore to start Infosys with no money, no influential connections, only 5 or 6 people, a pledge to never foster corruption, etc. When I derided it as a ‘pipe dream’ that he may live to regret, Nandan just listened and smiled.”
Infosys was registered as a private limited company on July 2, 1981. Infosys co-founder N S Raghavan’s house in Matunga, northcentral Mumbai, was its registered office. It was then known as Infosys Consultants Pvt Ltd. Later, Infosys set up its first office in Pune, at the Murthys’ home, moving to Bangalore in 1983 when they acquired their first client, Data Basics Corporation, from the USA.
What happened next has been one of India’s most widely-chronicled and inspiring tales of entrepreneurial success.