A schoolteacher's son from a Gujarat fishing village went to work as a clerk in a hot foreign port. He came home with a little money, a rented room and an idea. What he built changed how ordinary Indians thought about owning a share of a company.
In 1981, seven young engineers in Pune started a software company with ten thousand rupees, borrowed from one founder's wife. For years they had no money, few clients and endless government paperwork. This is how Infosys began.
At an age when most people retire, Harland Sanders lost the roadside restaurant he had spent twenty-five years building. He had a pension cheque, an old car and a recipe for fried chicken. So he started again.
Henry Ford was a farm boy who loved taking watches apart. His first two car companies failed. On his third try, he built a simple black car that ordinary families could afford, and the world began to move differently.
A government chemist in Ahmedabad began mixing washing powder in his backyard and selling it door to door from his bicycle, before and after work. He named it after the daughter he had lost.
Sarah Breedlove was born to parents who had been enslaved, orphaned at seven and widowed by twenty. She washed other people's laundry for a living. Then she found a problem she understood better than anyone, and built a business to solve it.
Jamsetji Tata dreamed of steel mills, power stations and a great institute of science for a country that was not yet free. He did not live to see most of them built. This is the story of how he planted them anyway.
Verghese Kurien was sent to a small Gujarat town against his wishes and planned to leave as soon as he could. He stayed for the rest of his life, and helped millions of village farmers turn their milk into a livelihood.
Walt Disney's first studio went bankrupt. His second lost its star character and nearly all its artists in a single meeting. On the long train ride home, he needed a new idea, and fast.
Soichiro Honda was a blacksmith's son who fell in love with engines. His first real product failed almost every test. Then the war destroyed his factory, and an earthquake finished what the bombs began.
