'A mistake I'm glad I made': Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani recalls skipping IIM exam

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani has opened up about why he never joined the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), a decision that set him on a completely different path. In an interview with Groww, Nilekani said he had planned to pursue management after graduating from IIT Bombay, but missed the entrance exam. 

"I came out of IIT (Bombay) and I thought I'll do IIM. But I missed the exam. I was not feeling well that day. So, I didn't take the entrance exam. I had been too lazy to apply for SAT and GMAT. So, I was actually at a loose end — what do I do next?" he recalled.

That chance turn, Nilekani said, led him to a small computer company in Mumbai that would change his life. "Somebody told me there's a company in Nariman Point. Why don't you go and talk to them? I heard about this small company called Patni Computer Systems. In 1977, IBM left India. So, there was a sort of a vacuum here...I heard they had online computers - in those days, that was a big deal," he added.

He walked in for an interview and met N.R. Narayana Murthy. "I walked into this room, met Murthy, who asked me some puzzle and said - you can join. So, I joined," Nilekani said.

That meeting marked the beginning of a professional partnership that would lead to the founding of Infosys a few years later. "That was Murthy's vision. He always wanted to start a company. He's about 10 years older than me. We all worked for him and we started Infosys," Nilekani said when asked whose idea it was to form a company. 

"By the early 1990s, India had changed a lot - you had economic reforms, the market opened up, and global companies started coming. We realised that unless we think big, we're not going to make it. So, we went into this scale thing and built India's first campus in 1992...five acres in Electronic City. There was no road as well. Then we did dharna to get the road built."

He said setting big goals became part of Infosys' culture. "We always set very large goals. Get to 100 million, get to billion, get to whatever 10 billion," he said. 

Nilekani served as the CEO of Infosys from March 2002 to April 2007. He succeeded Narayana Murthy and was succeeded by Kris Gopalakrishnan after completing his five-year tenure. During this period, Infosys' revenue grew roughly sixfold to around $3 billion, marking one of the company's fastest phases of expansion.​

Years later, Nilekani's career took another unexpected turn when he was invited to lead the Aadhaar project. "I wrote a book called 'Imagining India', where I tried to paint what are the ideas of India's transformation, and one of the ideas was that if everybody had an ID, it would make a big deal."

"The book did very well, and so then I got a job offer to implement my idea. I'm the only guy who got a job because I wrote a book about some idea," he said. 

He served as the Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) from July 2009 to March 2014.​