I'm from an Indian family of professionals, and my parents had to go through hardships themselves to send me to IIT-Mumbai.
Romesh Wadhwani
No one is an island. All these entities that drive economic development are interconnected in one sense or another.
STG is a combination of a holding company and a private equity model.
I don't want to take a company public and not have it do extremely well and fail the public shareholder.
I don't want to live with the guilt of messing up someone's retirement fund.
I feel that India lacks a level of philanthropy that is proportional to the wealth that is here, particularly among the top 5,000 industrialists and entrepreneurs.
I think the tradition of philanthropy is far better developed in the U.S. than in India, as is the whole notion of giving away 50% of your wealth while you are still living and not waiting till you're gone.
I have committed to giving away 80% of my wealth, much of it in India, but also in other countries.
Bioscience and biotech offer many opportunities. The U.S. focuses on the rich man; India has rich man diseases and poor man diseases. So you have a much larger set of opportunities.
If you look at the major industries of the future, IT and mobile are way up there.
We have a mentoring and angel investing programme. We are also talking to the government to help create a VC industry.
Having got the best of education myself, I firmly believe it is my personal obligation to give back to the community.
For most Indians in America, wealth is not inherited. Neither do we make it as heads of large hedge funds and private equity funds. For us to make it to the top, we have to use our knowhow to create great new technology products and build high-tech companies.
A philanthropic venture requires all the energy, knowledge and money from its founder that a company requires from the leadership team.
