N. R. Narayana Murthy

Murthy and six colleagues founded Infosys in Pune in 1981 with borrowed money, and its international growth rested on a specific adaptation: the global delivery model, in which a small team works at the client's site in America or Europe while most of the software is written in India, round the clock across time zones. In 1999 it became the first Indian company listed on Nasdaq. Co-founders including Nandan Nilekani and Kris Gopalakrishnan later ran it in turn.