5 Indian Entrepreneurs with Incredibly Inspiring Stories
While India has made its indelible mark as a hub for cultural diversity and rich heritage, not many know that its trading and finance management legacy also dates back to as early as the 1500s. This was the time when Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral established trading posts in Calicut and Cochin, taking back spices like cinnamon, pepper, ginger and cloves to Portugal.
Later, as more and more foreign countries began exploring India, our scope of trading increased, eventually paving the way for trading in loan securities. Ever since, India has only risen steadily in its trading and entrepreneurship endeavors, with several prominent entrepreneurs setting up their businesses and establishing their presence in the global market. Zuron remembers some of these notable entrepreneurs and celebrates their remarkably successful and inspiring journeys:
Dhirubhai Ambani
With products and services being offered in an incredibly wide range of domains, Reliance is now a household name synonymous with entrepreneurial success. But at the core of it was a little boy with a meager treasury but massive dreams. Working as a petrol pump attendant in Yemen, Ambani harbored a burning desire to find oil and gas in India, building a refinery and modern petrochemical plants. With the help of world-class machinery manufactured using world-class machinery, this budding entrepreneur set up his first textile mill in Ahmedabad in February 1966.
Eventually, Ambani’s dream child, Reliance Industries Limited, went public in 1986, with its first Initial Public Offering being issued the following year. Initially gaining 50,000 loyal shareholders, the Reliance Group proceeded steadfastly to include a whopping 33,00,000 individuals who “relied” on this company and his founder’s vision, he continued fanning his dreams—because really, dreams never end, and he knew it. At the time of Dhirubhai Ambani’s demise in 2002, the Reliance Group was valued at a whopping Rs. 75,000 crore—the dream come true of a young, ambitious Indian visionary.
Indira Nooyi
If Pepsi was one of your top five soft drinks and KFC or Pizza Hut among the top fast-food joints, there’s one personality whose contribution cannot be overlooked—Indira Nooyi. Besides being the first woman leader of PepsiCo, she was also one of the only 11 female chief executives of Fortune 500 companies back then, and a sheer inspiration for all the aspiring women out there.
After attaining a postgraduate degree in business administration, Nooyi went on to completed an additional master’s program in public and private management from the Yale School of Management and later worked as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group over the next six years. With considerable work experience at Motorola, Inc. and ABB, she joined PepsiCo in 1994 as the company’s Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Development.
In 2001, Nooyi became the President and CEO of the company. At this juncture, she handled the significant responsibility of managing the spin-off of the company’s restaurants—which included current fast-food giants like KFC and Pizza Hut—under the umbrella Tricon Global Restaurants, later renamed Yum! Brands, Inc. Under Nooyi’s guidance, the company acquired Tropicana in 1998 and entered a merger with Quaker Oats Co.
During her tenure as PepsiCo’s President, Nooyi led the company into global expansion, making PepsiCo a household name all over the world. And we couldn’t be more inspired!
Narayana Murthy
Perseverance, commitment, and innovation are just some terms synonymous with the mastermind behind one of the largest Indian IT companies and the fourth Indian organization to attain a market capitalization of USD 100 billion.
Born in Kolar, Karnataka, Narayana Murthy was raised against the backdrop of a typical middle-class Indian family environment. But his ambitions led him to pursue electrical engineering and obtain a master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology. He later worked in Paris in the 1970s on multiple projects. Carrying such myriad experiences with him, Murthy returned to India and began working at a computer systems company in Pune.
But somewhere, this talented IT professional knew that he wasn’t meant to follow a path already laid down for him. When Murthy started Infosys, his own IT brainchild, with six other IT professionals in 1981, nobody possibly knew what a giant it was to become in the upcoming decades.
It was when India moved towards economic liberalization and deregulation in the early 1990s that Infosys witnessed a massive business boom. With a broad clientele in several foreign countries, Infosys emerged as the first company to be listed on an American stock exchange in 1999. In 2000, Narayana Murthy was featured among Asiaweek’s Power 50 and in Business Week as one of the “Stars of Asia.”
Even amidst global downtimes, Infosys performed consistently and exceptionally well under Murthy’s leadership. We salute the indomitable courage and dedication of Mr. Narayana Murthy!
Azim Premji
Having had to take up a huge responsibility very early in life, Azim Premji perfectly embodies Bruce Lee’s quote, “If you want to learn to swim you have to throw yourself in the water.” Born in 1945 to entrepreneur Mohamed Premji, the founder of Western India Vegetable Products Ltd. (Wipro), Premji had to cut short his higher studies at the Stanford University abruptly and return to India owing to his father’s sudden death.
As Wipro’s new leader, Premji decided to steer the company’s sail towards the emerging IT and software market, which he believed had immense potential. And so, in 1980, WIPRO officially entered the IT industry, manufacturing mini computers by collaborating with Sentinel Corp, an American company. Soon, Premji oversaw the expansion of Wipro’s services, including the production of computer hardware and development of software. In 1990, the company further expanded to incorporate software services.
In 1999, Wipro became a publicly traded company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. And so, Azim Premji elevated Wipro from a small, family-managed vegetable oil manufacturing business to an IT giant achieving new pinnacles of global success.
Premji believed in innovation, excellence, and client-centered practices, which he constantly nurtured and fueled in Wipro employees. Today, Wipro stands on par with some of the most successful IT companies globally. And we couldn’t be more motivated!
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw
From being a master brewer to spearheading the first Indian company to export enzymes to the US and Europe, Kiran Mazumdar has established a legacy that we all look up to.
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw’s career as a master brewer came to a halt when she was rejected by Indian breweries owing to her gender. Thereafter, she was offered a job in Scotland, but before she could move, she landed the opportunity to work as a partner in India to establish an Indian subsidiary of the company Biocon Biochemicals Limited.
For Mazumdar-Shaw, there was no looking back from here. She started Biocon India in 1978 in the garage of her rented home in Bangalore with a seed funding of Rs. 10,000. Despite initially facing several challenges because of an untested model, lack of infrastructural support, and the prevalent gender bias against women entrepreneurs, Mazumdar single-handedly governed Biocon’s transition to a comprehensive biopharmaceutical company. The company offered an array of products, as well as a research-focused company looking into diabetes, auto-immune conditions and oncology.
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw’s focus on “affordable innovation” paved the way for Biocon India’s flourishing business. Today, thanks to this mastermind, Biocon’s research areas are immensely broad, including diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. When Biocon went public in 2004, its revenue was a whopping Rs. 500 crore, leaving everyone awe-inspired.
The success stories of some of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time in India inspire us to consider their strategies and ideas to sustain and flourish. At the heart of each of these masterminds’ success is their dedication towards financial planning and management, including embracing modern technology.
Today, entrepreneurs are increasingly adopting FinTech to power their businesses and elevate them to unprecedented heights. Zuron’s FinTech application helps budding and established entrepreneurs streamline their finance management processes, with systematic options to pay suppliers on time, coordinate with other stakeholders easily in real time, and flexibly choose to utilize bank or treasury funds at an invoice level to suit their business needs. With services pertaining to finance payables, receivables financing, supply chain finance and invoice discounting, we help you ascend in your entrepreneurial venture without worrying about mundane financial processes.
