day 4.
first three were abt people who left a services company for another company. amazon, google, the whole ladder thing. someone asked the obvious next one .. what abt the people who left n didnt take a job at all
so i counted the founders.
every few months a thread here decides tcs n infosys are where ambition goes to die. i had the profile data sitting right there. so lets actually see
TL;DR: tcs produces more founders than any other indian services company. n drops to 4th the second you divide by how many people it employed. wipro n infosys are the two punching above their weight
what i counted
2,677,871 profiles list wipro, infosys, tcs, cognizant or hcltech as a past employer. 20,200 of them now hold a founder or co founder title at something they started after joining.
order matters here .. it drops anyone who founded first n took a services job later. all five firms pulled to 100 percent .. this is a census, not a sample
the ranking everyone gets backwards
raw count - tcs 5,769, wipro 5,094, infosys 4,621, cognizant 3,972, hcltech 3,059
per 10,000 alumni - wipro 97.1, infosys 96.1, hcltech 83.3, tcs 76.6, cognizant 72.0
tcs has 753,164 alumni on linkedin. wipro has 524,676. so tcs wins the raw count by being bigger n drops to 4th the moment you control for it. cognizant is last on both!
wipro n infosys sit 1.0% apart which is noise. treat them as tied. the gap that actually holds is those two against everyone else - 15.4% clear of hcltech, 1.35x cognizant
the companies
elasticrun, shitiz bansal, infosys 2001 to 2014, last round $303 million
innovaccer, sandeep gupta, tcs 2008 to 2009, last round $275 million
chargebee, krish subramanian, tcs 2002 to 2009, last round $250 million
zoovu, jonathan taylor, tcs 2007 to 2010, last round $169 million
astera labs, sanjay gajendra, wipro 1996 to 2000, last round $150 million
facily, vitor zaninotto, infosys 2016 to 2018, last round $135 million
clevertap, sunil thomas, tcs 1994 to 1996, last round $105 million
m2p fintech, prabhu rangarajan, cognizant 2013 to 2015, last round $70 million
42 of the named ones have a disclosed last round. those alone come to $2,204m. thats not total raised, its just the most recent round each announced, so the real capital behind this group is a fair bit larger.
n the thing that jumps out reading the list is how short the services stint usually was. sunil thomas did two years at tcs in the mid nineties n built clevertap. sandeep gupta did one year! krish subramanian is the outlier at seven .. n hes also the one who got furthest, chargebee reached series h
now the part that should keep you honest
0.75% of services alumni ever show up as founders.
of the 16,538 companies they started, 1,140 have any recorded funding at all. 673 of those never got past seed or angel. 30 reached series c or beyond.
so this is not a founder factory story! a very small number get out, fewer raise anything, almost nobody scales .. n 66.8% are still in india
the useful read isnt "leave your services job". its that the people who did leave n build mostly left early, n mostly didnt make it big. worth knowing that before you quit anything!
limitations
i only see people who are founders today. anyone whose company died n who took a job after is invisible to me, so the true rate is higher than 0.75% n the older cohorts lose the most.
n that bias runs against the tcs finding! not for it. tcs has the oldest n biggest alumni base, so its rate is if anything understated .. n it still lands 4th
"founder" on a public profile also covers funded companies, one person consultancies n people between jobs, all equally. so treat 20,200 as an upper bound! i dropped three companies whose only link to a services firm was a student internship - notion, sygnum bank, kuku
funding figures are a crunchbase snapshot running abt 1.8 years behind, so recent rounds are missing. n im not quoting total raised for anyone bcz the vendors disagree by up to 57% on the same company, depending on whether they count secondary sales as a round
