Dhirubhai Ambani left his village in Gujarat as a young man with almost nothing, working first as a gas station attendant in Aden, Yemen, before returning to India in the late 1950s with a small amount of savings and an idea about trading yarn and spices — an industry dominated at the time by established, well-connected merchant families.
He started small, trading polyester yarn out of a modest office in Mumbai, but brought an unusually aggressive, ambitious approach to a conservative industry — reinvesting profits immediately into expansion rather than taking them out, and pursuing backward integration into manufacturing his own raw materials rather than simply staying a middleman trader.
In 1977, he took the unconventional step of taking his company, Reliance, public and actively courting small, first-time retail investors — many of them ordinary middle-class families who had never owned stock before — rather than relying solely on large institutional investors as most Indian companies of the era did.
By the time of his death in 2002, Reliance Industries had grown from a small yarn-trading operation into one of India's largest conglomerates, spanning textiles, petrochemicals, and energy, and Ambani was widely credited with reshaping how ordinary Indians thought about investing in the stock market.