founders

"HCL does a lot more on semiconductor design and works with organisations from all over the world. I was in Taiwan last year and I met with leaders of companies. Yes, it’s got the might but one of the leaders rightly pointed out that it took them 40 years to get there. So much of it had to do with the way skills evolved. We (India) have catching up to do, but technology will shrink that time of catching up. Investment in R&D and skills can’t be spearheaded by industries alone"

"In 2020, pre covid, there was talent in the big cities. There were centres in the likes of Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Noida among others. The evolution post covid is that a lot of talent is now spread across the smaller cities. We are struggling to get people back at work as a lot of people want to work remotely for reasons like bigger cities are more expensive to stay in"

"The steppingstone for building a great leader is getting a great education"

"So we asked ourselves, if we want a female CEO in a decade, what steps do we need to take to get there"

"We believe in depth, not breadth—at any given time, we’re only touching maybe 10,000 students. A lot of people say that we could be touching so many more lives, but you can’t touch that many lives if you’re trying to make a leader"

"Have a little faith in young daughters, they are not too bad"

"There will be some jobs that will go through a certain evolution, in the world of generative AI. However, there will be new jobs that will be created. If some companies are reducing headcount, it’s perhaps for a certain segment of jobs, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that opportunities will reduce. I think it will grow"

"These children have been phenomenal in the amount that they’ve developed. And hopefully in my lifetime, one of the VidyaGyan students will be the prime minister of India – that would be exciting"

"We have to plug the gap and bring them back without treating it as lost time"

"India is the technology talent hub of the world. It also helps global companies achieve diversity goals as the country produces the highest STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) talent in the world when it comes to females. Unfortunately, if you look at the data, it’s declining, but it’s still the largest number in the world"

"These women get married, have a family—it’s why they leave"

"The work we do is driven by our conviction to drive meaningful transformation by harnessing the power of inclusive education"

"So government should do what they do, and philanthropists should continue to act independently, too, but there are also many opportunities for them to work together through public-private partnerships"

"Such moments have been part of our evolution. Back in the 70s when the calculator came, everybody was scared and thought that children didn’t need to learn math. Then, we evolved the system of using them (along with students learning math). A few generations later came the search engine. Everybody was looking at information online and there was a certain evolution that took place there too. Then came the iPod and after that shortly came the iPhones and everything was available at fingertips. It evolved and helped consumers"

"With generative AI, it’s impacting the individual and helping in all walks of life. We are figuring out a way to evolve with it. The skills take a while to catch up. Our educational institutions also have a lot of catching up to do. Skills around data engineering, cyber security, and IoT (the Internet of Things) will have to evolve. Educational institutions have to start this if India has to stay ahead"

"The evolution and leadership transition started almost 15 years before it happened. We have had three CEO transitions and two CFO transitions in that period. Such changes prepare the board. When he transitioned out of the board, I had already been on it since 2013. I have been working at HCL since 2008. When he transitioned out of the company as chairperson, he completely left the organisation and the board. That was a mark of a mature organisation and of trust"

"Within the top 200 leaders of our company—out of 120,000 employees—we don’t have a single woman leader"

"I can’t say to you, “I live in a country of 1 billion and I’m touching 2 million or 3 million lives.” We don’t have fancy numbers to show, but I think we concentrate on depth of philanthropic impact and not breadth"

"These thoughts remained dormant through the first half of the 1990s, when I struggled to establish myself as a robotics and computer vision professor at NYU and Lehigh Universities. In a very real sense A.L.I.C.E. was born from the frustration of those experiences, and the realization that much of my own job as a professor was "robotic" responses to frequently asked questions."

"Go with your gut but use your brain"

"Hard work, knowing my personal power and working with an extremely talented and dedicated team is a big part of my success…After reinventing myself many times over, it is a great honor to be on the cover of Texas CEO Magazine with the hopes of inspiring other businessmen and -women to take big leaps in their lives and careers"

"If it’s the right thing to do, you push your qualms aside and you do it"

"I was working at a startup in New York City called Vision Applications, Inc. We were entirely funded by a Department of Defense contract to produce a miniature active vision system. My specialty at the time was computer vision and robotics."

"We get so stuck on our own viewpoints — we need help to be shown other options"

"If someone calls me authentic, that’s the biggest compliment they could give to me"

"Leadership does not come from the top down,Gaddis said. It comes from the bottom up"

"You need ‘rough riders’ in your life – the people who will shoot straight with you. They can call bullshit on you, they can tell you how great you are"

"No other theory of natural language processing can better explain or reproduce the results within our territory. You don't need a complex theory of learning, neural nets, or cognitive models to explain how to chat within the limits of A.L.I.C.E.'s 25,000 categories. Our stimulus-response model is as good a theory as any other for these cases, and certainly the simplest."

"Our thoughts were far away from natural language processing. We were, however, deeply concerned with issues of cost and robot design."

"Like many of our colleagues at the time we espoused a "minimalist" design philosophy based on cheap sensors and simple stimulus-response algorithms, rather than complex and costly processing."

"I try to find people who shore up my weaknesses"

"The concept of deception is layered like an onion. We can peel off one level and write programs like ELIZA that fool some of the people some of the time, and then peel off another layer and write a program like A.L.I.C.E. that (apparently) fools more of the people more of the time. The evidence suggests that we should take a serious look at the role of deception in AI."

"I was informed about this movie after it was already off to the races"

"They had written the script, they were moving ahead, and I asked my lawyer, ‘What do I do? I don’t want a movie made about me. Shut it down.’ He told me there’s nothing I could do"

"But I've structured it so that that call on the way home is totally sequenced perfectly to get back to my computer to then pick up another two things on Zoom"

"I’m both terrified and maybe slightly flattered, but the strangeness and the fear outweigh any flattery"

"If you are chopping veggies, you are forcing yourself to put the phone down or step away from the computer. It's extremely relaxing. As stressful as cooking might be, it's a stress that is different from the stress of the day. It creates a really nice shift of thought process"

"I don't really look at my life as a division of work and personal. I blend it"

"And maybe that works for me. And maybe it doesn't work for someone else. But I will tell you, it is hard"

"You just never know what you're gonna get, Wolfe Herd told Time.It's tricky because you need so much of your brain during the day to be a CEO. You need a rational, rested mind to function. Everyone says: 'One day at a time.' I actually prefer one hour at a time"

"How can generative AI actually get you into a healthy, empowering, productive conversation, cut through the noise, cut through the friction? And then get you offline"

"teach people and show them and guide them, how to behave better and to instil confidence in all of our daters"

"It is disappointing to see just how little women have advanced,she said.I've watched the fall of what people call 'the girl boss era'. That's tragic"

"I spend the first 30 minutes of the morning being cognizant of my family and dog — taking him for a walk, spending time with my fiancé — before it goes into madness and work mode"

"Women’s relationship with money will have to be fixed. Someone could be a high performer but opportunities pass by because of money - be it their own compensation or fixing a budget"

"Building products has become easier and cheaper, but building brands is harder than ever"

"My family environment was supportive; in hindsight, that was very important. You need to encourage women in your life to try things out, she said, adding that one must do the hard work alone but a support system makes all the difference. Instead of asking women ‘why?’ loved ones need to ask them ‘why not"

"From the start, I was clear in my mind that whatever venture I get into should benefit the society and be accessible to all segments. VLCC is a manifestation of that dream"

"There is no short game for a venture capitalist"

"The first phase of ROI is understanding if your unit metrics justify growth. Without that, there is no longer game"