Shiv Nadar on Bootstrapping

Nadar started his career inside the elite DCM management trainee system where he met the people with whom he later founded HCL in a Delhi barsati 'akin to a garage startup' — a deliberate echo of Silicon Valley origin myths adapted to a 1970s Delhi context.

Shiv Nadar, born 14 July 1945 in the Tamil village of Moolaipozhi, studied electrical engineering at PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore and graduated in 1967 before beginning his career at the Walchand group's Cooper Engineering outfit in Pune — a conventional start that belied the computing empire he would soon help build.

Forbes estimates Nadar's wealth at about US$29.2 billion, accumulated almost entirely from his holding in HCL Technologies, the IT-services company he cofounded in a garage-like setting in 1976 alongside five friends to make calculators and microprocessor-based systems.

HCL was founded in 1976 with an initial investment of roughly INR 187,000 — a small sum even in the India of the licence raj — pooled together by Nadar and six colleagues (including Ajai Chowdhry and Arjun Malhotra) who had previously been building and selling teledigital calculators through a partnership venture called Microcomp.

In a 2006 Wharton interview Nadar framed HCL's beginning at DCM's calculator division, where he and fellow engineers noticed that the programmable calculators of the day were the forerunners of personal computers; convinced they could build an eight-bit machine, they pitched the idea to India's Electronics Commission, which asked them to write a feasibility report.

HCL launched with roughly INR 20 lakh (about US$180,000 then) — a quarter from the UP government and the rest from founders' savings generated through a separate calculator-marketing company — a capital structure Nadar credits with teaching him the practical meaning of cash flow, profit and reserves.