In 1969, Romesh Wadhwani arrived in Pittsburgh with less than three dollars in his pocket. He had already completed his engineering degree from IIT Bombay and came to the US to pursue a master’s degree, followed by a doctorate.
After completing his PhD, he made another difficult choice. Instead of taking the safer route of joining an established company, he decided to build one.
There was one problem. He had never run a business, had no investor network and came from a family with no history of entrepreneurship.
The next few years involved cheap hotels, long journeys across the US and repeated meetings with investors who did not believe his idea was worth backing. But Wadhwani kept going.
The lesson began before America
Wadhwani was born just days after Partition. He was too young to remember it, but his parents had left Karachi and rebuilt their lives in India.
He says three things from his childhood stayed with him: unconditional love, a deep belief in education and a refusal to be defeated by circumstances.
At the age of two, Wadhwani contracted polio. By the time he was five, he still could not walk. His school principal was reluctant to admit him, but his father persuaded the school to give him a chance for one year.
That experience left Wadhwani with a lesson that would later influence how he viewed setbacks. “Another person’s judgment does not have to become your destiny,” he told Financial Express Digital.
For him, Partition was not directly a lesson in entrepreneurship. It was a lesson in rebuilding – security or position can disappear, but the ability to learn, work and begin again remains.
That idea would become important when he later left the relative comfort of Pittsburgh for Silicon Valley.
Dealing with $3 in hand and 125 rejections
But America also offered something Wadhwani had not seen in the same way before. “I arrived in Pittsburgh in 1969 with less than three dollars, and my immediate concern was financing my education,” he says.
“America seemed a place where knowledge, hard work, and ambition could matter more than family background,” he says. After completing his PhD, he decided to become an entrepreneur.
He travelled across the US looking for investors, staying in some of the cheapest hotels he could find. In all, he approached 125 investment firms. Most rejected him.
Yet the rejections became an education of their own. Every meeting taught him something about how investors assessed risk, how an entrepreneur should present an idea and what it took to persuade someone else to invest.
By the 30th rejection, he was not thinking about quitting. He was thinking about proving the previous 30 investors wrong.
That period also taught him to operate with limited resources and to be careful with money, a discipline that stayed with him as his companies became larger. “That experience made resilience a practical idea for me, not a slogan. It also taught me to respect every dollar and accomplish as much as possible with limited resources,” Wadhwani says.
The $9.3 billion exit
Then came the breakthrough. Wadhwani’s Aspect Development was sold for $9.3 billion in 2000. For many entrepreneurs, that kind of exit could have been the finish line. For Wadhwani, it became another starting point.
The sale gave him financial freedom, but he still wanted to build businesses. After nearly three decades as an entrepreneur, he enjoyed identifying difficult problems, developing strategies and bringing talented people together to solve them.
Instead of building one company at a time, he wanted to operate at a larger scale. That led to Symphony Technology Group.
Alongside his business career, Wadhwani also built the Wadhwani Foundation, focused on job creation and entrepreneurship. His interest in employment is personal as well as economic. A job, he says, provides more than income. It can bring dignity, family stability, confidence and the ability to plan for the future.
That belief would later influence his thinking about artificial intelligence and its impact on jobs.
Why did he start again at 70?
Then, at 70, Wadhwani made a bet that could have looked unusual to many people his age. In 2017, he founded SymphonyAI and committed $1 billion of his own money to the company.
The decision may look like a late-career gamble on artificial intelligence. For Wadhwani, it was anything but sudden. “By the time I founded SymphonyAI, I had been following AI for almost five decades, so it was not a sudden leap into a new field,” Wadhwani says.
At Carnegie Mellon, he encountered some of the early thinkers in the field. Later, at American Robot, his first company, he worked on an advanced AI-based vision system.
The technology worked. The problem was that the world around it was not ready. Computing power was expensive, software was less developed and the economics did not make the technology commercially practical.
By 2017, Wadhwani believed those conditions had changed.
Computing had become more powerful and affordable, vast amounts of data were available and open-source tools had accelerated development. Businesses were also beginning to understand how AI could be applied to their core operations.
He saw the pieces finally coming together. “It was never about age,” Wadhwani says.
For him, it was about whether he still had the curiosity to learn, the energy to build and the belief that technology could reshape industries. So he started again.
‘Customers do not want an algorithm’, says Wadhwani
Having lived through several technology cycles, Wadhwani believes AI is different from earlier enterprise software because it brings technology closer to business decision-making.
But he says companies can make a mistake by focusing too much on the technology itself. “Customers do not want an algorithm. They want an important business problem solved,” he says.
That means an AI company needs more than engineers and algorithms. It needs to understand the industry it is serving — its data, workflows, economics and regulations.
A healthcare company, for example, will have very different requirements from a manufacturer or retailer. The speed of the AI cycle also changes the equation.
Earlier technology shifts gave companies more time to experiment. AI is advancing faster, which means waiting can itself become a competitive risk. At the same time, Wadhwani does not believe AI will simply replace human decision-making.
Businesses involve ambiguity, regulation and accountability. AI can analyse information and make recommendations, but people still need to exercise judgment when the consequences are significant.
His view of successful AI businesses therefore rests on three things including deep technology, deep industry knowledge and the ability to deploy quickly enough to create measurable value.
His warning for India’s young workforce
For India, however, the question is not simply how many jobs AI will destroy. It is whether the workforce can move quickly enough into the jobs AI creates. Wadhwani’s answer to whether AI will create or destroy jobs is that “it will be both,” he says.
AI will automate repetitive and rules-based work. Some jobs will shrink and others could disappear.
But the technology can also make workers more capable — helping doctors with diagnoses, engineers anticipate equipment failures and entrepreneurs make decisions that previously required specialised expertise.
For India, that creates an opportunity, but also a challenge. Young workers will need to understand how AI works, where it can fail and how to use it responsibly. Communication, adaptability and deep knowledge of a particular field will become increasingly important.
The transition will not necessarily be smooth. New jobs may not emerge in the same places or in equal numbers as the jobs that disappear. That makes continuous reskilling important, with employers, educational institutions, governments and industry all having a role.
What would Wadhwani do differently?
For someone who has built companies worth billions of dollars, Wadhwani’s biggest regret is not necessarily about a failed business decision.
He sometimes wishes he had spent a few years working at an established company before becoming an entrepreneur. That could have given him management experience, mentors and greater credibility with investors.
But he also believes he could have aimed bigger, sooner.
His first two companies took almost 20 years to build. They were successful, but he believes there were moments when he accepted outcomes that looked good instead of asking what a much larger outcome could have been.
That changed when he left Pittsburgh for Silicon Valley, giving up a comfortable life and close friendships to enter a far more competitive technology environment.
The decision changed his trajectory. Today, decades after arriving in America with almost nothing, Wadhwani is still focused on what comes next rather than what he has already built.
“Even today, I am less interested in preserving what I have accomplished than in using everything I have learnt to attempt something more ambitious and more consequential,” he says.
Editorial Note: This profile is based on original reporting, including direct communication with Dr Romesh Wadhwani. To ensure a comprehensive perspective, FinancialExpress.com corroborated this information with public records and third-party sources. This content is not sponsored, and FinancialExpress.com retains full editorial independence and final authority over all editorial decisions.