Mukesh Ambani on Founder Culture

After schooling at Scindia and Hill Grange in Mumbai, Ambani studied chemical engineering at what is now the Institute of Chemical Technology, then enrolled for an MBA at Stanford. He withdrew in 1980 at his father's insistence, with Dhirubhai arguing that real-world experience would teach more than classrooms. Stanford classmates included Steve Ballmer; faculty influences included Nobel laureate William F. Sharpe.

Ambani traced his technology obsession across decades: chemical engineering in the 1970s as Reliance moved from textiles into energy, and mobile internet in the 2010s. He argued that the next 20 years would overshadow the prior 300 — 'I wish I was 30 years old today' — and that purpose, not profit, drove Reliance, sequencing societal value, then customer, then employee, then shareholder value, in that order.

Asked about competing with Sunil Mittal of Bharti Airtel and Kumar Mangalam Birla of Idea Cellular, Ambani was conciliatory publicly: India was big enough for everyone, he said, and the opportunity was to deliver Prime Minister Modi's Digital India vision to 1.2 billion people. The corporate olive branch masked an unusually aggressive roll-out in which he challenged competitors on regulatory and pricing fronts simultaneously.