Akash Ambani’s advice to IITians

Brut India

Reliance Jio Chairman Akash Ambani spoke on the importance of failure, his college regrets and life lessons from his father at the IIT Bombay Techfest.

Transcript

00:00My father, one of my biggest inspirations and heroes is always wanted me to be an engineer.

00:07Full disclaimer, I'm not an engineer.

00:09In fact, he was not believing that I was going to come and speak here,

00:12so he sent my wife Shloka, who was kind enough as witness to be here.

00:16You know, I've been obsessed with technology since my father got his first phone in late 2003.

00:23And for me, what technology really does from an obsession of changing languages

00:28on a Siemens S45 phone, what I realized, it's a great equalizer tool.

00:36You know, it crosses the boundaries of demographics, it crosses the boundaries of caste,

00:41it crosses the boundaries of borders.

00:43And you said it, you know, that you come from Bihar and to them,

00:49a geo-service is no different from a service that we have in our top cities.

00:54I always think that you make life through inspirations.

00:58And I was lucky to have my inspirations right at my house in terms of my grandfather,

01:04my father and my mother. And from a very young age, you know,

01:08whilst I was growing up, the talks at home, of course, used to be around what's good for India.

01:16Thinking back to your college years, what is it that you would have done differently?

01:23Hindsight is the greatest tool. No, definitely try to pursue an engineering degree.

01:28I was very fortunate to have a very good college experience.

01:31So when I look back at it, college is the best time of your life.

01:35There's no doubt to me about it.

01:37The couple of things that I would do probably differently is,

01:40I would learn from my classes, but I would learn from my classmates even more.

01:44And I would look at the whole college experience as a wholesome experience.

01:50If I look back today and say what's the best part of college is really the friends I made.

01:58And really focus more on that.

02:02That's something that I would do a little bit differently than what I did in my four years at Brown.

02:09Running a business is like permanently being in a driver's seat, right?

02:13You can't be very, very distracted at all points of times.

02:17From my perspective, I've always said that if you don't enjoy, and as cliched as it sounds,

02:22if you really don't enjoy it, then you're not going to get that.

02:27Don't be afraid of failure. I think that's something that I'm lucky that my parents have been able to guide us

02:36and say that it's okay if you fail. It's important to recognize when it happens

02:41and take those steps to really change that quite quickly and course correct.

02:50What makes us most proud at Jio is the products and services that we roll out,

02:55but the amount of lives that we're changing on a daily basis.

02:59That's what motivates me personally to come to work every morning and try to improve a billion people's lives.

03:11For more information, visit www.fema.gov

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