NR Narayana Murthy: India's IT innovator

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Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire, the show where we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

Then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Zing Singh, and I'm a journalist, author, and podcaster.

I'm Simon Jack, and I'm the BBC's business editor.

In this episode, we're talking about someone that many of you may know as the father-in-law of the current British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.

He is N.

R.

Narayana Murti.

So Murti's worth about $4.5 billion right now, which puts him around 650th in the world's rich list and definitely in the top 50 richest Indians.

And he is known, Mr.

Murti is known as the father of India's IT boom.

If you had to hold a gun to my head and ask me over the last 20 years to name one Indian company, it would be the one that he founded.

And it's called Infosys.

He founded it in 1981 with six mates and 10,000 rupees that he borrowed from his own wife.

40 years later, Infosys is worth $100 billion.

He's now retired, but when he was chief executive, he would start at 6.20 a.m.

every morning to set an example to workers and regularly worked an 80 or 90 hour week.

And he recently spot a national debate in India when he suggested that young people should expect to work 70 hour weeks.

I don't know if you could...

Well, maybe you could pay me to work a 70 hour week.

I thought you did work that hard.

It's all AI, Simon.

It's just all chat GPT.

Anyway, despite his wealth, he doesn't live the high life.

He still resides in the same flat he did decades before becoming a billionaire.

And his wife even says he cleans his own dishes after meals.

I wonder if he can say that about his son-in-law.

His daughter Akshata is Rishi Sunak's wife and so Murti has become very well known in the UK as the father-in-law of the Prime Minister.

Their wealth as a family has become a feature of British public life.

I mean she was twice as rich as the late Queen and we think Rishi Sunak and I can't think of anyone else or that family are the richest family to ever inhabit 10 Downing Street.

10 Downing Street is sort of a downgrade from the kind of places that they're used to living in for sure.

Let's have a listen to him talking to the BBC's hard talk in 2005.

Infosys is a wonderful example of entrepreneurship.

Many times people ask me what is the biggest contribution of Infosys.

I tell them the biggest contribution is the following.

Hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs in India have gotten enthused by this experiment because they say if these seven jokers could do it, we can do it too.

I think that we have unleashed a power we have unleash a a a a a a a feeling in people that they too can contribute they too can create jobs they do can solve the problem of poverty by entrepreneurship

interesting that he's talking about creating an aspirational class of indian entrepreneurs and there's no doubt that if you think of india now you think of it being a tech like bangalore or bangaluru as as it's as it's now known is a real feature of the world technology scene it's not just some out there thing, it's built into the fabric of particularly in outsourcing, for example.

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to think of a time before India was considered in that way.

I mean, it's something that certainly I've always grown up with.

Yeah, but let's go back to the beginning and see how he built this colossus.

Murti was born in the kind of dying days of the British Raj in a town called Sidlagata in Karnataka in the kingdom of Mysore under colonial rule.

Yeah, he was the fifth of eight children.

His father was a school teacher in Mysore.

And a week before he turned one, there was this enormous kind of world-shaking event, which was partition.

And it kind of marked the end of almost a century of British rule.

And it split the continent in half between Pakistan and India.

And a lot of people died.

Yeah, it was a really seismic moment.

And the repercussions of that in some areas are still with us today.

India's India's first Prime Minister, Joelal Nehru, basically pursued what I think was socialist, broadly socialist policies as this sort of new country was getting on its feet.

So under Nehru, they established five-year economic plans, which are kind of

exactly.

It's the mainstay of kind of socialist policies, highly regulated, protectionist, you know, at times isolating themselves from the rest of the world.

And at the time, India was much closer to the Soviet Union than it was to the West.

Yeah, protectionism of India was a big feature, and the changing of that over the last three decades has been a real phenomenon.

But of his own childhood, Murthy said, you have to imagine a lower middle class family in a district headquarters in the 60s.

My father used to tell us about the importance of putting public good before private good.

Mother would talk about sacrifice and truth and he started out as a pretty committed socialist.

Yeah, a committed leftist, you know, kind of in the same way that Ruben Murdoch started out as a leftist.

That's right.

Don't forget to listen to that podcast.

Anyway, his father wanted him to be a civil servant, but his dream was to become an engineer in a hydroelectric power plant.

And it's quite a strange thing to choose, but it was seen as this was the kind of embodiment of shining temple, if you like, of modern India.

So he studies electrical engineering at the University of Mysore, and he graduates in 1967.

And he follows that up with a master's in technology from a place called the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur.

Yeah, and at that university, he discovers the thing that he will devote his life to, which is computers.

But it's quite a funny story.

On the second day of his degree,

a fellow student takes him to see this computer.

The computer.

The computer.

And this shows this giant machine pouring out reams of documents.

And he tells a friend he's seen a computer, how impressive it is.

But his friend explains what he's actually seen is a printer.

I'm sure printers, computers in those days were just gigantic machines.

You know, who can really tell the difference?

But he got the bug, that's for sure.

And he talks with great fondness about his time at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur.

He said it was Halcyon days.

We had lots of young professors who'd done their PhDs in the US.

So there was this kind of exoticism of US know-how coming back to India, which was quite transformational over the decades.

And he says they were all in their 20s, 30s, full of optimism and energy.

He caused the computer this wonder machine that he got hooked on.

It's kind of interesting how so many of our billionaires start out in tech and kind of have this transformational encounter with a computer.

Yeah, it was life-changing.

Well, it was technology that changed the entire world and they were there right at the beginning and he was there at the beginning in India.

Yeah, it makes you realize how tech became one of the biggest wealth generating industries around.

Probably the greatest, the technology era is the greatest engine of wealth creation the world has ever seen.

I'm guessing.

That's the backdrop.

And like you say, many of our billionaires are around

drinking from this well and here he is right at the beginning.

And the well still hasn't dried up.

That's true.

So Murti's at this bleeding edge of technology and his first job comes in 1970 where he's the chief systems programmer at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

In fact, he said that's the phase he enjoyed the most.

He said the atmosphere was collegiate.

We'd work 20 hours a day.

We'd learn a lot and there was not very much money.

They're earning about £48 in today's money a month.

But he said taking that job was the best decision of his life.

And interestingly, he also learned quite a lot from a professor who said it's important to aspire to be more.

You know, this is what it means to be an engineer.

It isn't the theory, but the application of the theory to solve problems and make a difference to society.

And that make a difference to society is a key theme that runs through his story.

And, you know, you'll hear him talk about it to this day.

But he's been on quite an interesting political journey, as we'll find out.

Oh, definitely.

So he has a kind of a change of direction in Europe.

So after two years working as chief systems programmer, he moves to Paris and he helps to design an operating system for an airport to handle cargo.

And he says these years in Paris were the most influential of his life.

And what he observed there is, you know, coming from India, he said, I saw how in a Western country, even the socialists understood that wealth has to be created first before it can be distributed.

You cannot distribute poverty.

And he says Paris was where he learned these three founding principles which he's applied to his life.

So one, the power of entrepreneurship in an environment of the free market to create wealth.

Two, the beauty of an enlightened corporate democracy, which is quite the mouthful.

And three, the role of compassionate capitalism, that's what he calls it, in building a happy country.

For me, it's interesting that he has to preface capitalism with the word compassionate, right?

Because that kind of implies that, you know, capitalism isn't so compassionate after all, that it in some way fundamentally doesn't really care about people.

I think that, yeah, I think that people would say that the problem with it is, is that it can create wealth, but it's not very good at distributing it evenly.

And I don't really know what compassionate capitalism means, but I think what it means is that you remember that economies and companies are made up of individuals which operate in the communities and societies and environment in which they exist.

And that you have to recognize the value and the importance of all of those different stakeholders rather than just just a pure profit motive.

What's the meaning?

What's the role of companies within society?

I think that's what they mean.

And I think that's what he's trying to get at, which is that it lifts all boats and increases the wealth and prosperity and fairness of the country in which it operates.

And he's very big on this.

He's very, he's Mr.

Indian.

It's all about sort of, you know, raising living standards in the country.

And it's interesting because that's basically the central tension of, I mean, this whole podcast, right?

Can you create enormous amounts of wealth?

Can you become a billionaire and still have a net good on this earth?

I feel like Mohti would say that you can and that he's an example of that, right?

Where, you know, obviously he's accrued enormous wealth and lavish riches, but he can still live modestly.

He can still be an example to everyone else in the country that you can make loads of money and still give back to the country that you were born in, that raised you.

And he's very, very passionate about the future of India.

Yeah, he's clearly civic-minded because, you know, in 1974, he quits this job in France and decides to head home hitchhiking all the way back to northwestern India.

But he also donates his savings to charity before he does, though.

Okay, we'll, with a little tick in the mark on Philantrine when we come to judge him later on.

It's a hell of a hitchhike, that, all the way from Paris to Amritsar in northwest India.

But he saw on that journey, literal and metaphorical, he saw how things worked in Western Europe.

And he said that that time his belief in leftism, socialism, communism even started to crumble.

He realized that the only way that countries can solve the problem of poverty is to encourage entrepreneurs to create more wealth and more jobs.

Yeah, capitalism is the key to get India out of poverty.

And then he has a shocking experience actually behind the Iron Curtain.

Yeah, I mean, you can only imagine how scary it would have been for him.

So in Bulgaria, which was part of the Eastern Bloc at the time, he was arrested for being a suspected spy because he was chatting to a woman on a train.

Yeah, and he was actually locked up and said he spent 60 hours in jail without food and water.

And eventually, the police, because they had no proof, kind of sent him on his way.

And he says, That experience cured me from being a confused leftist to a determined, compassionate capitalist.

There's nothing like being locked up for 60 hours to give you a life-changing moment.

And what's interesting about that episode is that this is a time when India was pretty close to the Soviet Union.

This was his experience of what Soviet-era Bulgaria looked like, and he didn't think much of it.

He actually said later on, if this is how they treat their friends, how do they treat their enemies?

Yeah.

So in 1976, he's back in India and is setting up his first business called Softtronics, making software for an Indian market.

But there is one problem with this business plan.

There is no market at the time, none at all.

And also, I'm not an expert on Indian history, but I remember I would have been six, seven years old.

I remember the late 70s and through to the mid 80s.

It was a time of huge unrest.

There were huge strikes.

There was Indira Gandhi, who was in charge at that time

announced a sort of crackdown, almost absolute power.

There was even a mass sterilization program to try and contain an exploding population in India, which was run by Sanjay Gandhi, her son.

But there was lots of industrial unrest, so a pretty volatile time then.

God, so it was a really, a really dark time.

In fact, there was something called the emergency, which was announced, which again was a kind of crackdown, almost absolute power installed in the person of Indira Gandhi.

And it lasted for a long time, so like 21 months, right?

Yeah, and it ended in 1977 when the Janata Party came to power.

And then there was the first of a series of economic reforms, including one which is still a bugbear to some foreign investors to this day, which is that if you're a foreign investor, you're required to go into partnership with an Indian company.

China runs a similar kind of idea now.

It was difficult to break into the Indian market if you were a foreign company.

Right.

And is that because it costs more money and takes time to find an Indian kind of partner?

Well, I mean, India has,

you know, for decades been bedeviled by bribery, corruption.

It's very difficult to find a partner.

The level of bureaucracy, I don't know if you've been to India many times, but there's like when just going from the airport, from passport check-in to the airport, you'll have to show your passport three or four times.

There'll be three or four, whatever.

I always thought this is crazy, but in fact, it's actually a mass employment measure because there's now 1.4 billion people in India and you've got to find something for everyone to do.

So bureaucracy is a way of life and that has been very off-putting to foreign companies over the last few few decades and actually Murti was one of the people who managed to sort of in a way unlock that a bit.

Wow, I went to India once and I remember having to buy a train ticket and I was thinking to myself while I was in the queue doesn't does it really need to take this long?

It doesn't need to involve this many people.

So yeah that makes so much more sense now.

So what it meant was this kind of atmosphere, the unrest, the atmosphere, the corruption, the bureaucracy meant that big firms like Coca-Cola and IBM withdrew from India entirely and India was miles away from the emerging technology boom that was beginning to happen elsewhere.

Yeah, so it's only unsurprising that Softronics fails within 18 months.

So he gets a new job at Patani Computer Systems in Pune and that's where he meets his future wife and our Prime Minister's mother-in-law, Suda.

And Suda has always said that Murti was broke constantly at the time.

And she actually says she maintained a book of his debts to her for three years.

He never returned the money and finally I tore it up after our wedding and the amount that you know he owed was a little over about 4,000 rupees or about 250 quid.

Yeah, despite him racking up these debts they actually got married in 1978.

And Suna herself is actually very accomplished.

She was a computer scientist and engineer.

She'll go on to write novels and non-fiction books.

And to this day she chairs the major philanthropic foundation they'll found later on in our story in 96.

Yeah, in fact her role is really significant.

In a video that went viral in 2023 she said, I made my husband a businessman.

My daughter made her husband Prime Minister of the UK.

So women are in charge in this family.

Behind every strong, successful man, wow, debatable.

Is an Indian billionaire.

Is an Indiana daughter.

Or an Indian billionaire's daughter.

Yes.

So anyway, then he founds the company, which becomes the source of his fortune.

So Murty sets up Infasys in 1981 with six mostly younger engineers from Putney Computer Systems.

And basically what they're going to do is they're going to write computer code and develop software for other companies.

They will do it as a contractor for other companies.

I mean, it's kind of amazing when you consider what Murty managed to do because, you know, him and six mostly younger engineers, you know, the jokers he talks about in that clip, Murty actually is said to have poached them from the company itself and they all became co-founders.

He became the CEO and they just worked out of a small apartment.

And Suda is instrumental in the foundation of Infosys, this giant company we know so well today.

She lent her husband 10,000 rupees, the start-up capital for firm.

There's a little bit of mythology about how much that is worth these days.

It was probably worth around $1,200.

Folklore and even the Infosys website talks about it being worth $250.

It's probably worth $250 in today's money, but it would have been worth more like $1,200 back then.

Nevertheless, a small acorn from which grew a mighty oak.

Yeah, especially when you consider it became only the fourth Indian company to ever reach a market cap of 100 billion.

Yeah, and the idea behind Infosys was it was set up to create systems, software systems for other companies.

So it's not like consumer products like Microsoft is doing.

And that's quite interesting.

So in a way, he's appealing to companies to outsource some of their software needs.

And outsourcing becomes, if you like, the lifeblood in a way of many Indian firms.

And And he's right at the beginning of this phenomenon, which becomes a global phenomenon.

Outsourcing becomes an industry in its own right.

So is it fair to say that outsourcing was pretty much born in India?

Certainly India was the country which turned outsourcing into an art form and became the kind of go-to country.

And this is quite interesting because of India's history.

There was a highly educated, English-speaking, pretty anglicised in their attitude, workforce, and that was the secret to Indy's success in the outsourcing world.

There's an interesting story about Murti founding Infosys, which is that he dreamed of founding this company before turning 35 because he thought that being over 35 was much too old for the kind of success he was dreaming about.

Do you know what?

Someone once said to me, because I haven't always been a journalist.

I worked in finance before.

I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do.

And a friend of my family sort of said, said to me, Simon, figure out what it is you want to do before you're 35.

So there we go.

They're the similarities between me and

NR Narayan Murti.

Not so different.

Murti founded Infasys a month before his 35th birthday.

Nick of time.

Just in the nick of time.

And you decided to be a journalist long before you turned 35.

Yeah, I think I was 32.

There you go.

You've got one over.

This Indian billionaire.

And he says the aim wasn't just to make a lot of money, though.

The seven founders met in the bedroom of his apartment and they decided on a mission statement, not to be the best, the biggest or the most profitable, but to earn the respect of all our stakeholders.

It's not really catchy, is it?

No.

Not really the stuff they're doing.

They had a better way of putting it, which is profit with honor.

That's a bit catchy.

Okay, yeah.

That makes me think of, you know, like seven samurai.

So that was to do the right thing, do the job well, and then success would follow.

But the state was still not receptive, particularly to entrepreneurial innovation or indeed international investment.

They were deeply suspicious of international investment.

Yeah, and in fact getting a single computer would literally take them years.

So they started off in 1981 but their first computer was only installed in February 1984.

I saw that fact as well.

I've just made me wonder what they were doing during those three years.

I don't know, writing things out by hand.

I mean all the import documents right had to be taken by hand to Delhi over a thousand miles from Bengaluru.

I mean even now I mean I looked this up on Google Flights.

It would take you three hours to fly between the two cities.

Yeah, and you had to go make loads of trips to that, 30 visits, and it would take an average of two to three years.

This is the sort of the stifling bureaucracy that we talked about, which was a barrier to other companies investing and partnering with Indian ones.

I mean, I was really surprised by this because by the late 90s, apparently there were still only around a thousand computers in the whole of India.

While, you know, obviously at the same time in the US and Europe, there were hundreds of thousands of people already with their own personal PCs.

Yeah, that's an amazing fact that...

So growth was pretty slow in the 80s as they were starting out, not helped by Infosys' refusal to pay bribes.

And that is

pretty unusual for India, particularly in that period.

At the time, the company was also importing pack software from overseas into India, but this was subject to 135% import tax.

And they said they had to give that up because we wanted to do business by the book.

Most companies, this is Murty talking, he said they manipulated their invoices to avoid paying certain duties.

And we decided we weren't going to do that, even though it wasn't illegal, according to many lawyers.

And Infosys needed that cash flow, but they said they wouldn't operate in a grey area.

So they got out of that particular, the importing business.

I'm sure there were quite a lot of people screaming at them to just

come on, man.

Yeah,

you know, go with the flow.

But anyway, they slowly established themselves throughout the 80s, even though it it was slow going.

So they entered into a joint venture with Kurt Salman Associates, which was at the time a leading global management consultancy firm from Atlanta in the US.

And this was in 1987.

And it was the first big Indo-American joint venture.

And it kind of showed that, you know, this policy of operating in an honest, trustworthy way was a good one, that it was paying off.

Well, it vindicated that approach because I think what it meant was other companies could say, here was a reliable partner, here's someone we can sort of, you know, do business with because we understand the way they're doing business.

And we, you know, it passes the smell test of how they go about what they're doing.

And I'm assuming at the time going into business with an Indian company, given the kind of political backdrop and you know, the corruption, as you said, was kind of a big deal for an American company.

Yeah, but in fact, it was the American company which actually collapsed.

And the collapse of the American part of this joint venture almost pushed Infosys to the verge of collapse.

So one of the founder partners of Infosys quit, but Murty managed to convince the others to stay.

And within a year, they regrouped, and there was another offer on the table to buy out the company for basically the equivalent of $1 million.

Okay, so they've been offered a million dollars to sell the company to someone else.

At that point, Murty's share of the company is worth roughly $166,000, one-sixth of a million, basically.

So, still a long way off being a billionaire.

And every other founder is ready to kind of sell up.

This is the point at which I would have cashed out, by the the way.

Yeah.

But again, Murti says, no, let's stay.

So they've been offered a buyout.

They turn it down.

In 1991,

India's finance minister then launched a program of reforms, which is a big economic liberalization.

And Murti himself says this was a pivotal moment in both unlocking investment in India and the growth of Infosys itself.

Yeah, he said, if there's one shining example of the good that came out of the 91 economic reforms, it's Infosys.

And they saw an immediate impact from this.

In the years following those reforms,

Infosys' revenues were doubling or tripling every year.

And the tech developments happening at the same time in the 90s allowed Infosys to become a world leader in outsourcing.

Yeah, so you've got highly technical, highly educated people in India who are prepared to do work for a fraction of what people in Western companies are getting paid.

So it becomes a no-brainer in a way to say, I'm going to sort of do this over there.

And the outsourcing revolution gets into full swing.

And it's also because of the internet, right, that enables them to be...

connected to an office in India hours and hours away from the main headquarters in the US.

Yeah, although the internet was not then in 1991 is not quite the internet that we know today.

But you could say work on this project and you could get the final code back to the US company having had it worked on over in India.

And Indian workers were actually up to 30 times cheaper than those in the West.

Yeah, this is in a way globalization in action.

You can see why it makes sense for companies, they get the same work done at a fraction of the price.

But of course, it's not without its drawbacks and the whole outsourcing thing becomes quite controversial, both economically and for consumers, you know, who are either put through to call centers in other countries.

And politically and economically, it becomes a bit of a football.

Yeah, because politicians aren't happy about domestic jobs being moved overseas.

You know, they see it as competition with the people who vote for them.

And emphasis actually gets criticised by American politicians later on in the story for doing exactly that.

They try and make amends for that and will establish US offices as we'll see as we go through the story.

But it lists on the Indian Stock Exchange in 1993 and it was among the first companies in India to introduce employee stock options, which is something we've discussed before, which is giving your employees the right to buy shares in the company at a time in the future, at a certain price, with the idea that if the company goes up in value, the right to buy at this lower price will become incredibly valuable, and you can make big money.

It's an incentive for everyone in the company to make the company as valuable as possible.

And in fact,

that stock option plan came up when we were discussing Bill Gates and how Microsoft and the employees at Microsoft were incentivized to make that the colossus that it is today.

And weirdly, Murty is sometimes called the Bill Gates of India.

But the IPO wasn't popular initially, right?

I mean, it actually looked like it was being undersubscribed.

It didn't find any takers at the initial offer price of 110 rupees a share.

So the lead managers at Infosys had to pick the shares up at a discount.

But fortunately, the management at Infosys convinced some big names to back them at this lower price.

Including Morgan Stanley, the big American investment bank, which ended up buying 13% of the entire company.

And that turned out to be a great move because the shares went, when they finally listed, they went from 95 rupees each to 160 on the first day of trading.

So Murty and those others and Morgan Stanley all made a lot of money on day one.

Right.

And Infosys was growing.

So it grew to 700 employees.

It was making revenue of 18 million dollars monthly, mostly from the software exports.

Infosys' customers for its programming at the time included General Electric from the US, Reebok, which is based in the UK.

And Murti said that today we're competing on quality and productivity and not just on cost.

So they're not getting rich and successful just because they're outsourcing.

It's about what they're able to offer to people.

They're not just cheap, they're technically proficient.

And in 1995, he set out an ambition to be a $100 million company by March the 31st, 2000.

He said he wanted to have a thousand rupee millionaires among our staff here.

That's a thousand millionaires in rupee terms.

And then he said in US terms, we probably have around $50 million here today.

That's 50 millionaires in dollar terms.

And Murty, given he was the head of the company, was definitely one of them.

So in 1995, we can confidently say Nariana Murti is a millionaire.

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So how does he get from a million to a billion to get on our list?

Well on 11th of March 1999 Infosys makes an even bigger move.

It becomes the very first Indian company ever to list on Nasdaq.

I used to know what Nasdaq stood for, National Association for Security Dealers and something.

But anyway, it's the go-to place to list your shares if you're a technology company.

All big names that we know today, Facebook, Amazon, Google, that's where they started.

Nasdaq became the home exchange if you're a technology company.

So it's a big deal if you get on there.

And he actually paraphrased Neil Armstrong, saying it was a small step for Nasdaq, a giant leap for Infosys and Indian software.

And what it does do,

once you're listed on somewhere like Nasdaq, you are expected to behave and to present your financial results in a fairly disciplined way.

Murty said the listing brought submission to the discipline of an international financial framework.

And not only that, but if you ever see the Nasdaq exchange, it's got all these little four-letter abbreviations for them.

And being on Nasdaq gives you visibility in corporate America.

And it's a great bit of advertising.

It's a bit of a stamp of legitimacy as well, right?

Correct.

Because you have to be legit to be listed on Nasdaq.

And in fact, you know, Nasdaq were chuffed to have them as well because they wanted to have international companies.

And they said that Infosys is the epitome of what we want a Nasdaq-listed company to be.

And Infosys kind of becomes this gold standard for technology outsourcing because Murty's insistence on doing business by the book, you know, not paying bribes, like not operating in those legal grey areas is paying off for them.

Yeah, because basically people say, I hear that outsourcing some of our technology to India would be a good move.

I've got no idea where to start.

Where's a brand I can recognize and have some trust in?

So they become the trusted partner for both American and European companies.

So Infosys had revenues of $121 million the year before they listed on Nasdaq.

But in the first six months of trading, Infosys shares had quadrupled in value.

They brought their market capitalization, that's the value of the whole company, to $6.7 billion.

So he was certainly a multi-millionaire in 2000 and was being described as a near-billionaire in the press.

And 270 of his employees are now US dollar millionaires.

And those are employees who are presumably mainly based in India.

And, you know, Murti's stated goal of being a compassionate capitalist who brings prosperity to India seemed to be kind of paying off.

Yeah.

Growth continues pretty much unabated.

And in 2002, Narayana Murti hands over the chief executive role to Nandan Nilakani, who was one of the original founders, and Murti becomes chairman.

But still, Infosys is continuing to do well, profits are rising.

In 2004, Infosys posted $1 billion in total annual revenues, a one-third increase in revenues over the previous year, so they are growing fast.

And also, this happens to be a big year personally for the Murtis because this is the same year that his daughter Akshata meets a certain Rishi Sunak who is studying for an MBA at Stanford University in the States.

Akshata was also studying the same course as Rishi Sunak.

Stanford University, it's a factory for producing technology whizzies

and

those US business schools have become a magnet for children of rich and successful people.

In the old days, everyone would go to like Oxford or Cambridge.

Now the actual top of the petreat is sending them to American business schools.

Well I wonder if is Rishi Sunak the first Stanford business school prime minister we've had in the UK?

I think he is.

Suffice it to say, it's listed in the Nasdaq.

It's a trusted partner to loads of American and European companies.

A company is a global player now.

But this success also brings a lot more scrutiny onto the company, right?

Because at the same time, there's this huge political debate erupting in the States over the job losses caused by offshoring, the outsourcing of work overseas.

And this spells serious trouble for Infosys.

Yeah, because it's getting two-thirds of all its revenue from American corporations outsourcing some or all of their operations over to India.

And Murti kind of tries to alleviate these political concerns, saying that these concerns are normal, but outsourcing is here to stay.

It's part of the new global economy.

But he...

makes concessions, right?

He has to kind of show politicians in the US that he's willing to invest in the country.

Yeah, and he wants to show that the US can get something out of it as well.

So he establishes a consulting unit in the US that employs 500 workers.

So he's alive to the political sensitivities.

But in 2006, he stands down as chairman after he's reaching the company's official retirement age of 60.

I mean, there's a lot of billionaires in our list who refuse to retire.

Yeah, Rupert Murdoch was in his 90s when he stepped down.

And one also imagines he's still doing a bit of backseat driving.

So is Murti to a certain extent.

So between 2006 to 2011, he served as non-executive chairman, chief mentor, which is an interesting position.

But his official departure came during the silver jubilee year for Infosys.

Yeah, and which is amazing.

To go from $1,250 or $250, whatever the number we so to basically a multi-billion dollar company in just 25 years is quite an achievement.

And it was an event marked with a massive big party on their spectacular new campus outside Mysore, which is about three hours from its headquarters in Bangalore.

I highly encourage you to Google what this campus looks like because I looked it up and it is spectacular.

I mean, it is crazy.

It looks like the White House on steroids is how I would describe it.

It's like, imagine how big the White House is and just kind of stretch it out for about several more miles.

So it's every bit the kind of shining temple of technology of a confident India, which is a major part of the global technology ecosystem.

And in this televised extravaganza, Infosys becomes the first company outside America to open the trading day on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange by ringing the bell.

Remotely.

They do it remotely though.

I mean that in a way is kind of sending a real message which is that's almost like globalization outsourcing remote working in a nutshell.

Yeah, very symbolic.

You can imagine the marketing team must have been quite happy when they came up with that.

Delighted.

And the company founders, they all wore their blue Infosys t-shirts.

They had the images were projected on the Nasdaq building right in the heart of New York's Times Square.

A A massive moment.

And when he left his role of chairman, the company had 70,000 employees, 3 billion a year in revenue, had offices around the globe, you know, everywhere from Atlanta to Beijing to London to Sydney to Tokyo to Zurich.

It's an empire.

Stockholm, Stuttgart, you name it.

And Murti's retirement came in the same year that Forbes pronounced him a billionaire, estimating his wealth to be 1.2 billion.

So in 2006,

he is a billionaire.

What happens once he hits that billion and goes beyond it?

So in 2009, he sets up Catamaran Ventures, which is a venture capitalist firm.

And his daughter Akshata, she runs the UK arm of the company, but the firm is funding startups in India at that time.

And Murti is personally involved in it.

He says he's in touch with many of the entrepreneurs.

They send him his business plans.

They do angel funding, early stage funding, mezzanine and late stage investment in every single sector of the economy.

And although he hasn't quite done with Infosys, though he stood down completely in 2011, he makes a bit of a surprise return in 2013 as executive chairman and director as Infosys is going through a bit of a rocky patch.

They bring in the old guard.

And he also receives criticism for breaking one of the company's core principles, which is no nepotism, as he takes his son Rohan on as vice president.

That's interesting, isn't it?

Because he made a big deal about that in

his early years.

But to be fair, he only stayed in the company as long as he was there.

When he stood down after the year, when he came in to do a bit of troubleshooting, Rohan left as well.

But he still stayed on as chairman emeritus, as an honorary title.

And he's remained vocal about the company.

I'm sure, actually, internally, there's probably some very frustrated emails.

flying around about Murty's involvement.

In 2015, there was a scandal around an acquisition.

Unusually high severance payment packages were being given out.

And Murty actually wrote to the board telling them that they had to make these investigations into whistleblower complaints public so that everyone could see them.

And yet again, in 2017, Murty was in the news again for raising concerns over alleged corporate governance lapses at Infosys, which the company denied.

He clearly feels that without his watchful eye, some unsavoury practices are beginning to emerge

in the company.

Or in other words, he can't let go.

Yes, it might be.

And his fortune doubles in 2021 because Catamaran Ventures sells a stake in a venture with Amazon India.

So his wealth, according to the Forbes Rich List, goes from 2.8 billion in 2020 to 4.35 billion in 2021.

So a huge jump in wealth there.

So at the end of our story, right now, he's worth around $4.35 billion.

dollars.

But now we come to the point where we judge him.

Where does Murty score on our good, bad, billionaire metric?

And there's a bit where we judge everyone based on categories like wealth, rags to riches, and we score them on a score of one to ten.

So we start out with just wealth.

And it's not just how much, it's sort of how you wear it, how you spend it.

Do you flaunt it?

Whether you flaunt it.

So, at four and a half billion dollars, he's not near the top of the tree, but a very respectable fortune nonetheless.

But he certainly doesn't flaunt it.

No, he doesn't.

And actually, in a Guardian piece which profiled Murti after Rishis Unak came to power, it says that he lives in the same Bengalu flat with his wife, Suda, that he did decades ago.

He drives a small car, he clears the dishes, he cleans his own toilet, which is pretty rare given he's a billionaire.

No hot couture, no lavish holidays, no private jets, no smanky homes, no luxury brands.

Everything about them is low-key.

It's interesting, isn't it?

Because his son-in-law comes into quite a lot of criticism about the way he spends his money.

But anyway, no high life for him.

So how would you score him?

Wealth,

middle of the pack, five.

Yeah, I would say maybe even a four.

I can't think of many of our billionaires who still live in apartments.

Yeah, you're right, actually.

Given we go up to sort of 200 billion plus, four and a half is not near near the top of the tree.

So I'm going to get, yeah, I think you're right.

I'm going to agree with you.

Give him a four.

So it's a four out of ten for him on wealth, but what about rags to riches?

The journey from being born under British colonial rule in India to becoming father-in-law of the British Prime Minister 75 years after partition.

I mean,

that's great.

That's the Nabio pic.

Yes, that really is.

It's not quite rags.

You know, he was well-educated.

It's not like Oprah Winfrey, who literally did wear wear rags, but he's come an awfully long way.

It's the Prime Minister's father-in-law bit when you start under British colonial rule.

That's the story arc rather than the actual money arc.

One thing that also needs to be mentioned is that he belongs to the Brahmin caste, which is the highest caste in India, usually the caste that accrues the most amount of wealth, opportunities, etc.

But it's officially banned, right?

But it's officially banned in India.

But some would say, well, many people would say, still continues to affect regular Indians' life chances and opportunities today.

But nevertheless, he started a company.

At 35.

At 30, which is relatively late in the game.

Late in the game.

But grew it from being, you know, almost impossible to have investment and a relationship with US and European countries to being an established part of the technology ecosystem.

So I'm going to give him...

If Oprah Winfrey is a 10,

this guy's a 7 then.

Yeah, I would give him a 7, given that the bar is established quite high because of Oprah.

The Oprah bar is very high.

Do have a listen to that one.

It's well worth it.

And now for villainy.

Is he a kind of textbook cartoon villain?

I think quite the opposite, isn't he?

Yeah.

I mean, you know, he stood out in a country whose business world was renowned, rightly or wrongly, for being nepotistic, corrupt, bribery everywhere.

He set out to do things slightly differently, honor with profit, play it by the book, make make it India's most respected company.

They had a value system about how they went about their business and that made them a trusted partner, a reliable partner

for US and European companies.

And I can't see any personal scandal where he's embezzled any money or

sort of done over his business partners.

In fact, he made them all rich.

So

I'm going to give him a one for villainy.

Yeah.

You know what sticks out to me, speaking of nepotism, is the fact that, you know, he set his store out quite early on, you know, no corruption, nothing like nepotism, etc.

Even when he went back on that and he brought his son in, he took him just as quickly with him when he left.

And when you look at some of the other billionaires we've spoken about, you know, we've made these big dramas out of successions and, you know, issues like who are you going to hand the firm over to?

You know, we talked about this with Bernard Arnaud auditioning his own children to take over LVMH.

And, you know, someone like Murty comes along and so he points out, actually, nepotism is kind of bad, right?

We shouldn't be giving our companies to our own kids kids or even letting our kids have anything to do with them you know he he's a really principled guy i think from what you know from from the publicly available information this this guy is not a villain no and actually i think some employees have actually seen murty fixing small electrical problems in the office canteen so that's great he's a he's clearly a humble guy

wouldn't it be great it'd be one of those great scenes when you know someone comes in for their first day of infosys and sees some guy there fixing someone's computer or whatever and thinks they're the kind of the it sort of troubleshooter It's excuse me kind of getting out the way.

And it's actually the guy who founded the company.

Having said all that about nepotism at Infosys, he also did get Ekshata

highly involved with Catamaran.

And also she is, she's got about 700 million pounds worth of Infosys stock, which is why the Murty Sunaks are the richest family ever to live in 10 Downing Street.

But that's like, it's less than 1% of the company.

So I know.

Look, this guy's not a villain, is he?

So let's give him, I'm going to give him a one for villainy.

Yeah, Yeah, I'm going to give him a one too.

I'm not going to give him a zero just in case anything comes to light after

this podcast is aired.

We're hedging our bets.

We're hedging our bets.

I'll give him a one.

One out of ten for villainy, now for philanthropy.

So Murty is actually on record as saying that the real power of money is giving it away.

He's done a fair amount.

In 1996, he helped found something called the Infosys Foundation that supports projects in healthcare, education, rural development, etc.

And he, in addition, requested employees to contribute one day's day's salary on a voluntary basis.

And they did something similar after 9-11.

In fact, I think they were the first Indian company and one of the few in the world outside the US to contribute to the firemen's fund for the fireman who died at 9-11.

And the foundation has donated clothing, medicine, food to the victims of the Indonesian tsunami.

But, you know, but he's no Chuck Feeney, is he?

The other thing that kind of irritates me a bit sometimes is that he gave $5.2 million to Harvard University and the Harvard University Press

and you know to establish this publication series called the Murti Classical Library of India and I know obviously he's raising the profile of India at a great academic establishment like Harvard but when people give money to Harvard I go these guys have got plenty of money you know they're swimming in it

the Harvard endowment fund is something like 15 billion I have to check the numbers, but it's it's many, many, many billions.

So I always have a problem when they leave money to Stanford or Harvard.

He'd be much better off leaving money to universities in India.

Yeah, I think that's probably right.

And for all I know, he does.

I mean, the stuff we know about his philanthropy is probably not exhaustive.

He also has a foundation which supports the Infosys Prize.

And this is an annual award for scientists, researchers, and engineers.

And it's one of the highest monetary awards in India to recognise research.

You get a gold medallion, a certificate, and prize money of 100,000 US dollars.

So on philanthropy, I suppose he would want us to consider his approach to compassionate capitalism as part of, as a form of philanthropy, right?

In that you create jobs and you create wealth and opportunities as a way of kind of distributing money in a way that philanthropy can't.

Yeah, right, raising all boats, everyone's better off as a result.

I mean, you know, questionable whether they should be in that bucket, but I think that he would want it to be in that bucket.

I don't know.

I'm going to give him a four.

Yeah, I mean, I'd give him a three.

Okay, three for you, four for me.

Power.

Well, this is interesting, right?

Because I think that even though if you're a British listener, you might be listening to this and only knowing him really through the Rishi Sudak connection.

In India, he's a huge deal.

Yeah, when he talks, people listen.

He certainly can pick up the phone to politicians when he wants to.

We know he could certainly pick up the phone and call one politician in the UK.

That's for sure.

That's true.

He's got a hot line

to number 10 Downing Street.

Power.

I don't know.

He's no Rupert Murdoch in terms of influence.

So I'd give him

three for power.

Right.

Within India, I would say he's probably, what, like a seven, but outside of India,

that's a good distinction to make.

So what's the difference between that?

Five and a half.

You said seven and four.

Seven and four.

You're going to give him five and a half.

Yeah.

Okay, that's our first half point.

Because I wanted to do the fancy maths.

Okay, well done.

Okay, so I'm going to give him a three.

You're going to give him five and a a half.

And then Legacy.

And this one, I think he does score highly on because he's often described as the father of India's IT boom.

Right, India's Bill Gates.

India's Bill Gates.

And there's no doubt that he pioneered the idea of outsourcing, using a highly articulate, educated, hard-working Indian workforce and mobilizing them for the benefit of US and European countries.

Now, obviously, there's a mismatch in terms terms of pay there, which they exploited, and you could say that's exploitative in a way, but it did help create India and Bangalore, Bangalore, to be one of the recognized outposts of world technology.

Is it fair to say that so many of the things that we now take for granted?

You know, that, you know, sometimes you call a bank or you call a company, the call center will be based in India, those kind of quirks about modern life, they wouldn't have existed without emphasis.

No, he certainly would have been in the vanguard of doing that.

I think you're right.

That, you know, obviously it helps companies be profitable.

Some people get quite irritated by it.

It's worth saying that outsourcing is not popular.

It wasn't popular in the US and Donald Trump had problems with it.

But it has revolutionized India as a country, I would say.

You could say he's riding the wave of globalization.

But in many ways, he's driving it as well.

So he could take some personal responsibility for it.

So, you know, for good or ill, that kind of globalization of human capital and outsourcing those kind of things became a feature of the global economy.

And it's part of the story of India, which is now more open and more outward-looking and is already a huge economic superpower, is now the most populous country in the world and could well have a bigger economy than the US in 20 or 30 years.

And I think what scores him quite highly for legacy for me is the fact that for a while he was just an outlier, right?

He wasn't doing things the way that people normally did business in India.

He refused to work in those legal grey areas.

He didn't want to be part of a kind of business system that was rightly or wrongly renowned for corruption and bribes.

So he was kind of forging his own path for a while.

He wasn't just riding the wave.

Yeah.

So I think he's on legacy he scores pretty highly.

I think he's something who's left his mark on India for sure and actually on the global economy.

So I'm going to give him an

eight.

I think for what he's done for India alone

and and what he continues to do actually, probably as a symbol of aspiration to show that you can compete on a world stage, you know, even at the relatively advanced age of 35 onwards, I'd give him a nine.

Okay, no, fair enough.

Okay, eight from me, nine from you.

So our final judgment is N.R.

Nariana Murti good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Oh.

I'm torn between, well, actually, you know what?

I'm going to say good

because for someone who still lives in the same apartment with his wife, refuses to take the private jet, washes his own dishes, and yet has left such a huge mark on his own country and has really helped to generate so many jobs and been a kind of symbol of aspiration.

I mean, he has to be good, right?

Yeah, he has generated a lot of jobs.

He might have also costed a lot of jobs, and the companies should have outsourced them to India.

But I agree with...

100% with your analysis.

I think you were pretty comprehensive there.

So I think that

good news and we won't get any hostile calls from 10 Downing Street press office.

I think that the father-in-law of the Prime Minister at the time of this recording is a good billionaire.

So who do we have next week?

The Oracle of Omaha, the greatest investor of all time.

You probably know him.

He's called Warren Buffett and he has not budged an inch from where he grew up in Omaha, Nebraska.

Still lives in the same house he bought in 1958, despite being worth $120 billion.

Thanks for listening to Good Bad Billionaire.

This podcast is produced by Hannah Hufford and Mark Ward.

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