In an exclusive interaction with Financial Express Digital, the founders of Persistent Systems, and Sid’s Farm explain why they walked away from American careers to build from scratch in India.
Every year, thousands of Indians make the same move in the opposite direction: they leave for the United States chasing better pay, bigger problems and a global career. A smaller number do the reverse. They give up settled lives abroad and come home to build something of their own.
Two of them, Dr Anand Deshpande, founder, chairman and managing director of Persistent Systems, and Kishore Indukuri, founder of Sid’s Farm, spoke to Financial Express Digital about why they left promising careers in the US and started over in India.
There’s a question that follows almost every Indian techie in the US around through the H-1B renewals, the promotions, the comfortable suburb: should I go back and build something of my own? Most file it away. A few act on it.
Dr Anand Deshpande and Kishore Indukuri acted on it decades before “reverse brain drain” became a phrase. One left HP Labs in Palo Alto; the other walked out of Intel. Both went home to start over with no safety net and built companies now worth hundreds, even thousands, of crores. They told Financial Express Digital why they made the bet, and what they’d tell anyone weighing the same one.
For Dr Anand Deshpande, founder, chairman and managing director of Persistent Systems, coming back was never an impulse. He had decided to return long before he set foot in HP Labs.
