Mamekam Learning - Startup Stories

Once upon a time, in the bustling city of Pune, India, the year was 1981, a time when the Indian IT industry was little more than a distant dream. In a modest apartment, seven engineers gathered around a table, united by a vision that seemed almost audacious: to build a world-class technology company from India that would stand shoulder to shoulder with the giants of the West. At the helm was N.R. Narayana Murthy, a man whose clarity of purpose and unwavering resolve would become legendary. The journey began with a humble sum of $250, borrowed from Murthy’s wife, Sudha Murty. This was all they had: a small seed of capital, a big dream, and an unshakeable belief in themselves. The founding team N.R. Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, S. Gopalakrishnan, S.D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh, N.S. Raghavan, and Ashok Arora set up Infosys Consultants Pvt. Ltd. in a cramped front room, which doubled as their first office. The early days were marked by struggle and sacrifice. There were no luxuries, no ca...

Once upon a time in the early 1970s, two childhood friends from Seattle, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, shared a passion for computers and programming. As teenagers, they spent countless hours tinkering with early computers at their school, dreaming of a future shaped by technology. The spark that ignited their journey came in January 1975. Paul Allen, then working at Honeywell, spotted the cover of Popular Electronics magazine featuring the Altair 8800, the first commercially successful personal computer. Excited, Allen rushed to show the magazine to Gates, then a student at Harvard. They immediately recognized a golden opportunity: the Altair needed software, and they could build it. With bold confidence, Gates called the Altair’s maker, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), and claimed they had already developed a version of the BASIC programming language for the machine even though they hadn’t written a single line of code yet. Over the next eight weeks, Gates and All...