Imagine India in the 1970s. It was a newly independent socialist country with very regulated businesses. Work opportunities were limited, computers didn’t exist for most people. There were no smartphones and to get a landline, you had to apply and wait for months. Brain drain was the done thing, especially in the educated Indian population, who aspired to a life abroad. No one, except for those with generational wealth would get into business in this India.

No wonder when Malhotra started his career, all he could dream of was to get a regular job so he could get married, head to the US, do a PhD and work for NASA. He joined Delhi Cloth and General Mills (DCM) and by chance got into a new team that the company was floating – which was developing calculators and microprocessors. But DCM, because of business restrictions by the Indian government, decided not to get deeper into technology as a business.

In 1975, six engineers of this team, including Malhotra and their head Shiv Nadar, left DCM to do their own startup. The initial company was called Microcomp Limited and started selling teledigital calculators and microprocessors to gather money for their main product — computers. “We all pooled together our money,” recalls Malhotra, “and started with a working capital of ₹50,000, quickly turning it into a decent amount to start R&D into developing computers.”

The Indian startup scene at that time was fledgling. Most of the technology companies were in the services industry like Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro. In hardware, very few companies were making inroads. There were international companies like IBM, which were selling machines at a different price point.

Just as they had earned money for developing their computers, they hit their first roadblock – the license mafia. “We were naïve,” says Malhotra, “we didn’t realise that the government had limited the licenses to manufacture computers to public sector companies only.” When a public sector company with a license approached them, they grabbed it with both hands and started a joint sector public company, naming it Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL Tech) in August of 1976. “That’s the reason we could take on the name Hindustan,” says Malhotra.

Funding was their next hurdle. No bank was ready to sanction loans without collateral and building hardware would need money. After running from pillar to post, they finally managed to get private loans to develop their business. A constant bump was to work around India’s import and export restrictions and bring together all the elements they needed for assembling a running computer.

“We realised much later that when we introduced our first computer in India’s closed market, in 1976, Apple came out with Apple One in the same year and month,” says Malhotra. They had to import most electronics, and transformers from the US, Japan and other countries and assemble them in-house for the Indian market. “In the 80s, we had a majority market share in India on workstations,” he says.

I think of ‘jugaad’, a term that is commonly used by Indians in most scenarios of their lives, especially in business. It’s a unique ability we gain, a mix of resilience, flexibility and creativity to work around and achieve things with limited resources, restrictions and daily roadblocks. It’s a unique way of doing business and even thirty years later, when I talk to startups which have started in India and are now setting up shops in Silicon Valley, it’s a term that’s commonly used.

By the 1990s, a new era started for both India and HCL. As Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao and finance minister Manmohan Singh brought in liberalisation in 1991 by peeling off the ‘license raj’, Malhotra moved to the Silicon Valley to further build HCL’s software services division. “Our initial plan was to sell hardware, but we got into the services business as we had good quality software engineers,” says Malhotra.

Used to jugaad, Malhotra had to readjust to the US way of doing business. In India, people did business across the table with a handshake. In the USA, most work was done over the phone, with legal contracts and lawyers to solidify a deal. “Establishing trust was very different,” he says. He faced casual racism but also noticed that the perception of Indians among American businesses was generally positive. Because of his past experiences, Malhotra soon became entrenched into the Indian diaspora who had never done business in India and were curious about how he had succeeded. “I was the only guy who had done a scaled business in India because none of the Silicon Valley Indians knew India.”

Today, the startup scene is dramatically different. Many startups begin in India, moving to Silicon Valley and further into global markets. The domestic market in India is large enough for businesses to thrive and financing has become easier. “The quality of life is much better, there’s a big enough market and we have talent,” says Malhotra, who continues to live with a foot in both countries, with a family who are split between Indian and US citizenship – by their choice. “If you’re moneyed, India’s a better place to live than the USA,” says Malhotra.

Shweta Taneja is an author and journalist based in the Bay Area. Her fortnightly column will reflect on how emerging tech and science is reshaping society in Silicon Valley and beyond. Find her online with @shwetawrites. The views expressed are personal.