Narayana Murthy feels today's entrepreneurs are better warriors, also luckier

Narayana Murthy, co-founder, Infosys, goes back — and forward — in time to describe the challenges that entrepreneurs of his generation faced compared to those today.

Widely credited with being one of the pioneers of India’s information technology sector and building one of the largest companies in the space, entrepreneur is perhaps a small word to describe Narayana Murthy. But it’s a tag he wears with pride.

“I think I’m one even today. At least [in having] an entrepreneurial mindset,” he said at the TiECon event in Mumbai recently. When asked for his message to budding entrepreneurs, he contrasted the problems his generation of entrepreneurs faced with the ones faced by today’s lot.


“Entrepreneurs today are much luckier than we were. There is intense competition here in India as well as outside. And competition is what will make you stronger and fitter,” Murthy said. The problems that his generation faced were primarily related to removing the various hurdles that the government had put in their path to success, he said.

Mission permission
He shared a story of his friend, KV Ramani (CMD, Digital Holdings). “He [Ramani] applied for three-day foreign exchange, where he specified that he would spend two days in Paris and one day in Frankfurt. When he went to Paris, the person that he was supposed to meet on the second day had gone to the headquarters in Frankfurt.

That person asked him to meet him in Frankfurt,” Murthy said. The result: Ramani spent one day in Paris and two days in Frankfurt instead. “Those days not only did we have to clearly specify the purpose of travel, we even had to submit a tour report on how we spent our time. So Ramani, an extremely honest, principled guy came back and submitted a report. He promptly got a show-cause notice,” Murthy concluded, eliciting much laughter from an audience that seemed unfamiliar with such restrictions.

He also spoke of licensing woes. “We had to go to Delhi 50 times and wait in the corridors of department of electronics to get a licence to import a computer worth $100,000, which today is maybe priced at $10,000,” Murthy said. “There were no telephone connections, forget about data connections. It would take seven years to get a telephone connection. The joke in India used to be that half the people are waiting for a telephone and the other half are waiting for a dial tone.”

Problems of today
In comparison, the problems that entrepreneurs face today are related to innovation and talent, according to the Infosys cofounder. “Your problems are how do I bring innovation and compete with the best people in the marketplace? That is a much tougher problem. A problem that each one of you is handling, which I don’t know if we could have handled,” Murthy said.

The second key challenge is talent related. “Today, whether it is in India or in the Silicon Valley, the biggest challenge is access to talent. And the salaries have gone sky high, even in India. Number two, while we have raised the quantity of people coming out of our colleges, the quality is sadly going down,” Murthy said, sharing a data point. “In 2002, I conducted an experiment. Those days our selection rate was seven people for every 500 resumes we received, 1.4 per cent. We conducted the same test for teachers of engineering colleges. The success rate was 0.14 per cent. You can imagine if this was the case in 2002, what the situation must be like today, with so many students and so many colleges.”

Murthy also dwelt on the question of high ambition. “I remember in 1981, I said that we’ll go public by 1991. We went public on February 27, 1993. It took us 12 years to go public. But today, you are not happy, you are not satisfied. You want to go public even if you are not making profit. So, your ambitions are high, your challenges are much tougher than we faced,” Murthy said. But then, there he paid the biggest compliment to the current crop: “What that means is you are better warriors than we were. That’s what I can say.”