In 1981, N.R. Narayana Murthy had a job, a young family, and an idea he couldn't shake — that India could build world-class software companies competing on the global stage, at a time when the country's technology exports were nearly nonexistent and foreign investment was tightly restricted.
He didn't have venture capital or a wealthy network to draw from. His wife, Sudha Murthy, herself an engineer, lent him roughly ten thousand rupees of her own savings — money she'd been putting aside — to help start what would become Infosys, founded with six other engineers in a modest apartment.
The early years were brutally slow — Murthy has spoken about waiting years for a single telephone line to be installed for the company, and navigating a maze of government permissions just to import a computer. He insisted from day one on a strict culture: no bribes, transparent accounting, and fair treatment of every employee, even when cutting corners would have been faster.
By choosing global-standard corporate governance at a time when it was neither expected nor legally required in India, Murthy helped make Infosys one of the first Indian companies trusted enough to list on the American Nasdaq exchange, and helped build the credibility that made India's entire IT services boom possible for the companies that followed.