The Born Entrepreneur

Romesh Wadhwani, who has been appointed by President Obama to the board of trustees of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, is a born entrepreneur.

Long before he came to be known as one of the technology leaders in America, he started his own business called Canteen Corp. When he was studying for his Bachelor’s degree at the IIT Mumbai in the 60’s, Wadhwani was appalled by the food in the then nascent university. He got his friends to put in Rs 10 each and started IIT Bombay’s first canteen.

Later he went on to earn an MS and a Ph.D from Carnegie-Mellon University. Once out of the university he faced the same problem that he faced when starting his canteen. A lack of capital. But he went around 125 venture capital firms across the US, before finally finding one who wanted to back him.

Wadhwani joined the Forbes list of billionaires when he founded a highly successful business-to-business e-commerce company called Aspect Development that made software for businesses to track internal spending and inventory. After selling off this company for a whopping $9.3 billion, Wadhwani founded Symphony Technology Group, a private equity firm investing in software and software services companies.