Who is Azim Premji?
Azim Premji is the founder of modern-day Wipro, one of India's largest IT companies, and one of the world's most generous philanthropists. Born on July 24, 1945 in Mumbai into a Gujarati business family, he dropped out of Stanford University in 1966 at the age of 21 when his father died unexpectedly, returning to India to take over a small cooking oil company called Western India Vegetable Products Ltd. He transformed it into a global IT powerhouse now known as Wipro. He stepped down as Chairman in 2019 after giving away $21 billion to charity, the largest philanthropic commitment in Indian history. In 2024, his net worth was $12 billion according to Forbes. His son Rishad Premji succeeded him as Wipro's executive chairman.
In 1966, a 21 year old Indian student at Stanford University received news that changed everything.
His father had died.
Suddenly. Unexpectedly. With no time to prepare.
He was studying electrical engineering at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. He had a future mapped out clearly in front of him.
And then in a moment, that future changed completely.
He packed his bags. Left Stanford. Flew back to India.
And took over a small cooking oil company called Western India Vegetable Products Ltd.
His name was Azim Premji.
And the cooking oil company that this 21 year old inherited in 1966 became Wipro.
One of India's largest technology companies. A global IT powerhouse. And the foundation from which one of the most extraordinary acts of generosity in the history of Indian business was built.
This is a story about building. But it is also a story about what you decide to do with what you build.
The Boy From Mumbai
Azim Hashim Premji was born on July 24, 1945 in Mumbai into a prominent Gujarati business family.
His father Mohamed Hashim Premji was a well-known businessman with operations across Burma and India. So successful in his rice business that he was known in some circles as the Rice King of Burma.
Business was in the air that Azim breathed from childhood. Not as a formal education but as a way of seeing the world. Understanding how commerce worked. How relationships were built. How trust was earned over time.
He was sharp. Curious. Methodical in his thinking.
He went to the United States to study electrical engineering at Stanford University. The best engineering institution in the world. A clear path toward a future in technology.
And then his father died.
And at 21, before he could finish his degree, he came home.
The Cooking Oil Company
Western India Vegetable Products Ltd in 1966 was not a technology company.
It was a small family business that made hydrogenated cooking oils, soaps and other consumer products. The kind of company that would have seemed entirely unremarkable to anyone looking at it from the outside.
The advisors around young Azim had a clear recommendation.
Sell the company. Go back to Stanford. Finish the degree. Build the future that had been planned.
He did not sell.
He stayed.
He took over the company at 21 with the quiet determination of someone who understood that responsibility was not something you ran away from.
He also understood something that the advisors did not.
He saw that the world was changing. That technology was going to transform every industry. That a company willing to adapt could go somewhere that a company determined to stay the same could not.
He started expanding beyond cooking oil.
Bakery fats. Ethnic ingredient-based toiletries. Hydraulic cylinders. He was building the business carefully, testing new directions, learning what worked.
And then he saw computers.
The Pivot That Changed Everything
In the early 1980s, Azim Premji made a decision that most people around him thought was either visionary or reckless.
He decided that Wipro would enter the technology business.
Not because he had a detailed strategic plan. Because he could see clearly that computing was going to change the world and he wanted Wipro to be part of that change.
He brought in engineers. Built a technology division. Started developing software and IT services for Indian and international clients.
The cooking oil company was becoming a technology company.
It was not an overnight transformation. It took years of patient building. Of hiring the right people. Of earning the trust of clients who had no particular reason to trust a company that had started life making vegetable oil.
But Azim Premji understood something fundamental about building.
Trust is not given. It is earned. One decision at a time. Over a very long period.
And he was willing to take the time.
By the 1990s, when India opened its economy and the world began looking to India for technology services, Wipro was ready.
Ready because Azim Premji had started building a decade before most people understood what he was building.
The Man Who Said No to Shortcuts
Here is what separated Azim Premji from almost every other business leader of his generation in India.
He was obsessed with integrity.
Not as a marketing position. Not as a corporate value written on a wall. As a genuine, non-negotiable operating principle that governed every decision Wipro made.
In an era when many Indian companies found creative ways to navigate the complex regulatory environment, Wipro under Premji paid its taxes fully and on time. It refused business that required compromising on ethics. It built relationships with clients on the foundation of doing exactly what it said it would do.
At a 2024 CII address, Premji stressed the importance of integrity for businesses, saying a lack of integrity signifies a lack of character.
That was not a speech. That was a description of how he had run Wipro for fifty years.
The results were visible in how Wipro grew. Not through shortcuts or political connections or regulatory arbitrage. Through genuine excellence at the work. Through building a team of people who believed that how you won mattered as much as whether you won.
That culture, built slowly and defended consistently over decades, became Wipro's most durable competitive advantage.
You cannot copy a culture built over fifty years by a founder who genuinely meant every word of it.
The Scale of What He Built
The numbers are important to state clearly because they are extraordinary.
Under Premji's guidance, Wipro grew its workforce and developed its global footprint, expanding to the US, Europe and other international markets.
A cooking oil company with a handful of employees became a technology company with hundreds of thousands of employees serving clients across the world.
The market value of what Azim Premji built from that small family business in 1966 runs into tens of billions of dollars.
But here is the thing about Premji that most analyses miss.
He never seemed particularly interested in the money.
He drove a Toyota. He flew economy class for years. He lived without the visible markers of wealth that most billionaires of his generation considered their due.
Not as performance. Not as a calculated humility strategy. But because he genuinely did not think that accumulating more than you need is the point of building something.
The point of building something is what you do with it.
And what Azim Premji did with what he built is the most remarkable part of this story.
The $21 Billion Decision
Premji is among the world's most generous billionaires, having given away $21 billion to his charitable foundation.
Twenty-one billion dollars.
To put that number in perspective, it is the largest philanthropic commitment in Indian history. It is one of the largest personal philanthropic commitments ever made anywhere in the world.
In 2001, he founded the Azim Premji Foundation, focusing on improving education in rural India. Later, in 2010, Premji became the first Indian to sign the Giving Pledge, committing a significant portion of his wealth to charity.
The Giving Pledge is the commitment started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett asking the world's billionaires to give away the majority of their wealth. Premji was the first Indian to sign it.
In May 2025, the Azim Premji Foundation committed $265 million over three years for underprivileged girls to complete their college education.
In August 2026, the Foundation is also accepting applications for its 2026 scholarship cohort, offering Rs 30,000 annually to eligible girl students from disadvantaged backgrounds for the full duration of their first undergraduate degree or diploma.
He did not give because it was fashionable. He did not give because it was good public relations. He gave because he believed that the purpose of building wealth is to use it for something that matters beyond yourself.
That belief, acted on consistently over twenty five years of giving, has changed millions of lives across India.
The Letter He Wrote When He Left
Premji's retirement from Wipro in 2019 marked the culmination of a remarkable journey. In a heartfelt letter to his employees, he expressed gratitude for the privilege of leading Wipro and acknowledged the contributions of his colleagues. He also donated two-thirds of his wealth, totalling $21 billion, to charitable causes.
In that letter he did not talk about what he had built.
He talked about what his people had built.
He thanked them. He acknowledged them. He said leading Wipro had been a privilege.
Not an achievement. A privilege.
That one word tells you everything about who Azim Premji is and how he thinks about what he spent his life doing.
He did not build Wipro for himself. He built it with his people. And then he gave most of what it produced back to the country that made it possible.
Azim Premji Leadership Lessons Every Founder Must Know
The Azim Premji success story is not just about transforming a cooking oil company into a technology giant. It is about a way of thinking about building and about wealth that most of the world has never fully understood.
Three lessons I carry from him into every decision at BeSpoke AI Stylist:
Integrity is not a strategy. It is a foundation.
Wipro's most durable competitive advantage was never its technology. It was the trust it built with clients over decades by doing exactly what it said it would do. Integrity compounds the same way that financial returns compound. Slowly at first. Then in ways that become impossible to replicate.
Adapt before you have to.
Azim Premji saw computers in the early 1980s and moved Wipro toward technology before most people in India understood what was coming. He did not wait for the market to validate the direction. He moved toward where he could see the world going and built the capability before the demand was obvious. The founders who build early always have an advantage over the founders who respond late.
Wealth is not the destination. It is the material.
Premji spent fifty years building Wipro. Then he gave most of what it produced to education and social development in India. He did not treat the money as the point of the journey. He treated it as the material from which he could build something even more important than a technology company. The founders who understand this early build differently from those who discover it late.
What I Take From This
I am building BeSpoke AI Stylist from India.
Bootstrapped. With my own savings. Without the certainty that what I am building will be understood by the world before it is ready to understand it.
And when I think about what it means to build with integrity in a country that is still writing the rules of its own entrepreneurial culture, I think about a 21 year old who came home from Stanford when he did not have to, took over a cooking oil company when no one would have blamed him for selling it, and spent the next fifty years proving that how you build matters as much as what you build.
He did not take the easy path.
He took the right one.
And he took it every single day for fifty years.
That is the standard.
One Final Thought
In 1966, a 21 year old student left Stanford and came home to run a cooking oil company.
He could have sold it. Gone back to his degree. Built a different life.
He stayed.
And over the next fifty years he turned that cooking oil company into one of India's largest technology companies, built it on a foundation of integrity that most companies never develop and then gave away $21 billion to make sure that the country that made it possible could give its children a better chance.
He drove a Toyota. He flew economy. He said leading Wipro was a privilege.
Not an achievement.
A privilege.
That single word is the entire philosophy of Azim Premji in one breath.
Build well. Build honestly. And then give back more than you took.
That is not just a lesson in business.
That is a lesson in how to live.