A moonshot idea: Shiv Nadar’s daring dream of selling minicomputers in the US
₹1.75 lakh (the total savings at the time of its six founders)—was not even a speck on the global IT firmament back then. India was still two decades away from being accepted as the IT services capital of the world. Notwithstanding a bold new policy announced by the Rajiv Gandhi-led government in 1984, which enabled the import of technology for making personal computers in the country, the domestic PC market was minuscule in size, with any real progress hamstrung by opposition from powerful unions in sectors like banking.
But if anyone could defy the odds, it was Nadar, a man of enormous self-belief who had quit his well-paying job at DCM Data Products, to start HCL along with five other intrepid travellers like him. Together, the six co-founders embarked on the risky journey that entrepreneurship was in the 1980s, well before the dawn of private equity and venture capital in the country. After capturing a significant slice of the small but growing Indian market for personal computers and having tested foreign waters with its subsidiary Far East Computers in Singapore, HCL now set its sights on the world’s toughest market to crack.
The market for PCs in the US of the 1980s was dominated by the likes of IBM, along with a whole host of clones. Smartly, HCL didn't go after this crowded segment. Instead, it identified the minicomputers market, which had recently been cracked open by emerging giants like Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett Packard, among others.
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