N. R. Narayana Murthy: from Rs 10,000 to building Infosys

A small town and an engineering degree

Nagavara Ramarao Narayana Murthy was born on 20 August 1946 in Sidlaghatta, a small town in present-day Karnataka. His family was middle class, and his IIT Kanpur alumni profile notes that he went to a government school.

He studied electrical engineering at the National Institute of Engineering in Mysuru, finishing in 1967. Two years later, in 1969, he completed a master's degree at IIT Kanpur. Those years gave him the base in engineering and computing that the rest of his career was built on.

“It is better to lose a billion dollars than a good night's sleep.”

— N. R. Narayana Murthy, via Seminar

Learning computers the hard way

His first job was at IIM Ahmedabad, where he became the chief systems programmer. There he worked on India's first time-sharing computer system, a setup that let many people use one computer at the same time. He also designed a BASIC interpreter, a program that runs code written in the BASIC language, for Electronics Corporation of India Limited.

Then he tried to build something of his own. He started a company called Softronics. It did not work, and it closed after about a year and a half. Instead of giving up on technology, he joined Patni Computer Systems in Pune and kept learning.

One event in these years changed his thinking. In 1974 he was arrested and sent away at a border town between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. He has said that this experience moved him away from left-wing ideas and towards what he calls compassionate capitalism: creating wealth in a fair way and sharing it.

Infosys: seven founders and Rs 10,000

In 1981, Murthy and six other software professionals started Infosys. The starting capital was Rs 10,000, which his IIT Kanpur profile says was provided by his wife, Sudha Murty. In a 2000 interview with Seminar magazine, he described the founders as people from middle-class homes with no big business house behind them. They had their skills and their willingness to work hard.

The early years were not easy. In the same interview he spoke of repeated setbacks, including a bank loan being turned down. In 1990 the founders received an offer to sell the company for about Rs 2 crore. He told Moneycontrol in 2021 that he did not want to sell and offered to buy out his co-founders instead. They all chose to stay.

India's economic reforms of 1991 opened new doors. Murthy has said they allowed Infosys to open offices abroad, hire people overseas, list its shares in India and abroad, and give employees stock options. In 1999 Infosys was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange in the United States.

Leading India's software story

Murthy was the chief executive of Infosys from 1981 to 2002, when co-founder Nandan Nilekani took over. He is credited with designing and putting in place the Global Delivery Model, a way of doing software work for clients around the world with large teams based in India. IIT Guwahati's profile of him calls this model the backbone of the Indian software industry.

Recognition followed. He received the Padma Shri in 2000 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2008. He was the first Indian to win Ernst & Young's World Entrepreneur of the Year award, and Fortune magazine named him among the 12 greatest entrepreneurs of our time in 2012. He became chairman emeritus in 2011 and briefly returned as executive chairman in 2013 and 2014.

The skills and habits that made the difference

Murthy often talks about values more than money. In a 2025 interview with McKinsey, he called respect his guiding star: respect from customers, employees, investors and society. He also said fairness is something he learned from his mother, and that he wants people to feel they were treated justly even when a decision goes against them.

He believes in leading by example. In the same interview he explained that showing the behaviour you want works better than lecturing people about it. As an engineer, he also insisted on using data and facts to make decisions, and tried not to let old opinions decide new questions.

In the Seminar interview, he said he tells new staff never to speak ill of customers, never to break the law and never to shortchange anyone. He also described decisions at Infosys being made on the strength of an argument, not on the rank of the person making it, and a stock option plan that reached people at every level of the company.

Learning never stopped either. In a 2006 interview with YaleGlobal, he described how Infosys kept training its people, including running a nine-month programme in India for newly hired graduates from the United States.