How IITs connected Bill Gates to India

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ connection with the Indian Institutes of Technology goes way back...

Transcript

00:00In a sense, my first connection with India came because of the IITs.

00:07One of the great people who worked for me said that he would go over to India and hire

00:11about 15 people.

00:13At the time, the Indian press said this was a terrible thing because all these great people

00:20were leaving the country.

00:23The U.S. press said this was a terrible thing.

00:53It's been a long time since I've been here at IIT Delhi, and it's phenomenal all the

01:01great progress that has taken place since then.

01:06In a sense, my first connection with India came because of the IITs.

01:12One of the great people who worked for me said that he would go over to India and hire

01:17about 15 people who'd been students at IIT, and that would strengthen Microsoft's engineering

01:24capabilities.

01:25At the time, we only had a few hundred people, but even so, it was so hard to find amazing

01:32engineers.

01:33I thought that was a good idea.

01:36At the time, the Indian press said this was a terrible thing because all these great people

01:43were leaving the country.

01:45The U.S. press said this was a terrible thing, all these people coming from another country.

01:53But I think now, over 25 years later, we can say that was a phenomenal thing both for India

02:03and for the United States, and of course for Microsoft itself.

02:10A number of those people are the ones who came back to India, started up the offices

02:15here and earlier this week, I was down in Hyderabad at the biggest site for Microsoft

02:22development in India, celebrating the 25th anniversary at a time where we now have, Microsoft

02:29now has more than 25,000 amazing people here in India doing work.

02:35If I think back on my Microsoft career and the wonderful people that I got to work with

02:41and why I enjoyed that so much, a very high percentage of them are people who joined from

02:47India.

02:49First and foremost, though, in that list would have to be Satya Nadella, who we're so lucky

02:54to have as the CEO.

02:57Well, I'm now looking at India in a far broader way than just the Microsoft lens.

03:09I'm lucky enough through the work of the foundation to look at innovators in India who can help

03:16with all kinds of problems, starting with health, but also agriculture, gender, climate,

03:26so many areas that we need fantastic Indian innovation.

03:32And Indian innovation really gets stronger all the time.

03:38One thing you can count on is that because India's a big country, people understand its

03:43innovation.

03:44It's not really valuable at small scale, nor is it valuable if the cost is so high that

03:52only a small percentage of the people can get access to it.

03:57And so this is a fascinating time.

04:00The need for innovation to deal with many different challenges that I'll talk about

04:07is greater than ever.

04:09But the pace of innovation is also rising to meet that challenge.