reasonable disposable income…

The important thing is you should come out with such products and services that people with a reasonable disposable income in India should be able to use it. It cannot be the disposable income in the US. That cannot be the benchmark. It has to be Indian.

It is well documented that you had a very small capital base to start with. You went on to build one of the biggest brands in global IT. For somebody starting today, can they do something similar and what is the key to building of that big brand?

First of all, the market is difficult for a general expertise company – a startup company which focuses on some kind of a generalized expertise like project management, software development, etc. On the other hand, if a startup was to focus on a niche area like embedded systems for automobiles, or let us say, systems for improving the quality of water, or designing software for handling risks in derivatives… any of these. In other words, it has to be a focused niche area. There they will be able to perform better than an Infosys. Because they have something tangible that we did not have, they can establish credibility with customers more easily than we could. In addition, they can provide other services. The name of the game is to create a niche market, in a specialized area.

Second, my belief is that brands are created by doing unusual things. . For example, when Pradeep created Dataquest, there was no such magazine in India. And he became the leader. Everybody noticed him, everybody wrote about him. The way you build brands is to do something unusual and get written by other people, get noticed by other people easily – because you are doing unusual stuff. Then you sustain them with some advertising.