PHANEESH MURTHY

Phaneesh Murthy did the classic IIT-then-IIM route, mechanical engineering at IIT Madras and management at IIM Ahmedabad. He started at Sonata Software in 1987 and joined Infosys around 1992.

By 1995 he ran worldwide sales. This is where the legend comes from.

He built the sales engine that took Infosys from $2 million in revenue to roughly $700 million in under ten years, and he made the board. He left in 2002 after a lawsuit.

He then founded Quintant Services, which iGate bought in 2003, and he became iGate's CEO in 2008. In 2011 he led iGate's $1.2 billion takeover of the larger Patni Computer Systems.

Infosys is where he made his name, running worldwide sales and marketing from 1995 and sitting on the board from 2000. Primentor is the consulting firm he co-founded in July 2002, right after Infosys.

Quintant Services came next in January 2003, and iGate bought it that August. At iGate he became CEO in 2008 and pulled off the Patni deal, briefly turning a mid-size firm into a billion-dollar player.

After iGate he co-founded PM Health & Life Care and the jobs site Zigy in 2015, and sat on the boards of Marlabs and Opus. He also advises IT services firms such as InfoBeans.

Murthy is not a fund manager. He is a builder and a closer.

His whole bet, across every job, has been on relationships over transactions. He famously said he does not sell projects, he sells relationships.

He also pushed the IT industry away from billing by the hour and toward pricing tied to business results, which was a genuinely bold idea at the time. As an advisor now, he backs IT services firms and helps them scale their sales the way he scaled Infosys.

The headline win is the 2011 Patni acquisition. Murthy had iGate, a roughly $300 million company, buy Patni Computer Systems for $1.22 billion, the biggest takeover in Indian IT at the time.

It was the smaller fish eating the bigger one, funded with a $700 million loan and backing from Apax Partners. Overnight the combined company had 25,000 employees and was knocking on the door of $1 billion in revenue.

Before that, his real masterpiece was quieter, taking Infosys sales from $2 million to $700 million.

The same kind of mistake, twice, and it ended both his biggest jobs. In 2002 he left Infosys after two women filed lawsuits against him, including his executive secretary Reka Maximovitch, whose sexual harassment and wrongful termination suit Infosys settled for a reported $3 million.

He always denied the allegations. Then in 2013, as iGate CEO, he was fired after a subordinate filed a complaint.

The internal probe found he had not broken the sexual harassment policy, but that he had failed to report a relationship with her. Two of the best runs in Indian IT, both cut short.

Talent does not buy you a pass on judgment.

Sell the relationship, not the project. That is the core of it.

Murthy believed a client who trusts you will keep buying for years, while a one-off project ends. He also championed outcome-based pricing, charging for the business result a client got rather than the hours worked.

The logic is simple. If you are confident you create value, tie your pay to that value.

It is a riskier way to charge, but it lines up the vendor and the client.

Murthy keeps his personal life out of the headlines, which, given his career, is understandable. He was born in Bangalore to a middle-class family and is now based in the United States.

His best-documented passion outside work is wildlife. He founded the Kabini Foundation for jungle conservation, and in 2022 he donated thermal drones and 9,000 camera traps to the Nagarahole Tiger Reserve.

Murthy went to Bishop Cotton Boys' School in Bangalore, then earned a mechanical engineering degree at IIT Madras, then an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. It is the most elite education combination India offers.

The twist is that a mechanical engineer became the greatest software salesman the country produced. He never really sold machines.

He sold trust.

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