Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ connection with the Indian Institutes of Technology goes way back...👀 💻
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00:00In a sense, my first connection with India came because of the IITs.
00:07One of the great people who worked for me said that he would go over to India and hire
00:11about 15 people.
00:13At the time, the Indian press said this was a terrible thing because all these great people
00:20were leaving the country.
00:23The U.S. press said this was a terrible thing.
00:53It's been a long time since I've been here at IIT Delhi, and it's phenomenal all the
01:01great progress that has taken place since then.
01:06In a sense, my first connection with India came because of the IITs.
01:12One of the great people who worked for me said that he would go over to India and hire
01:17about 15 people who'd been students at IIT, and that would strengthen Microsoft's engineering
01:24capabilities.
01:25At the time, we only had a few hundred people, but even so, it was so hard to find amazing
01:32engineers.
01:33I thought that was a good idea.
01:36At the time, the Indian press said this was a terrible thing because all these great people
01:43were leaving the country.
01:45The U.S. press said this was a terrible thing, all these people coming from another country.
01:53But I think now, over 25 years later, we can say that was a phenomenal thing both for India
02:03and for the United States, and of course for Microsoft itself.
02:10A number of those people are the ones who came back to India, started up the offices
02:15here and earlier this week, I was down in Hyderabad at the biggest site for Microsoft
02:22development in India, celebrating the 25th anniversary at a time where we now have, Microsoft
02:29now has more than 25,000 amazing people here in India doing work.
02:35If I think back on my Microsoft career and the wonderful people that I got to work with
02:41and why I enjoyed that so much, a very high percentage of them are people who joined from
02:47India.
02:49First and foremost, though, in that list would have to be Satya Nadella, who we're so lucky
02:54to have as the CEO.
02:57Well, I'm now looking at India in a far broader way than just the Microsoft lens.
03:09I'm lucky enough through the work of the foundation to look at innovators in India who can help
03:16with all kinds of problems, starting with health, but also agriculture, gender, climate,
03:26so many areas that we need fantastic Indian innovation.
03:32And Indian innovation really gets stronger all the time.
03:38One thing you can count on is that because India's a big country, people understand its
03:43innovation.
03:44It's not really valuable at small scale, nor is it valuable if the cost is so high that
03:52only a small percentage of the people can get access to it.
03:57And so this is a fascinating time.
04:00The need for innovation to deal with many different challenges that I'll talk about
04:07is greater than ever.
04:09But the pace of innovation is also rising to meet that challenge.