“I grew up seeing my father and other founders slog day and night, I didn’t want to be an Infosys nerd,” says Shruti, a gadget freak (she’s obsessed with her iPhone) who otherwise excelled in computers as a child.
Shruti’s restaurant, says another Infosys founder N.S. Raghavan, is a great idea. “The children of Infosys founders need not join the company and flout its much-vaunted corporate governance principles. All of them have enough wealth. Anyway, Infosys is a professional company, not a family firm,” he says. Raghvan’s two sons, who are in their mid-thirties, run life sciences and wealth management initiatives.

Infosys’ chief mentor Narayana Murthy sums up the ambitions of the next generation succinctly. “The children are well-qualified to run their own marathon,” he says. His daughter Akshata, an MBA from Stanford University, works as a venture capitalist in green technologies in the US. Son Rohan is a computer science Ph.D student at Harvard University.
Given their sizable independent or inherited fortunes, the Infosys kids really do not need to do much beyond watching their money grow. The Murthys collectively own 5.4 per cent of Infosys. The Nilekanis, whose both children are studying at Yale University, own 3.45 per cent. Infosys CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan, along with his wife and daughter, holds 3.35 per cent.

But the Infosys Gen Next is mindful of their wealth. “The assets my brother, who’s in tenth grade, and I will inherit have to be managed properly,” says Shruti, who doesn’t want to delegate the task to an outsider because, “you could get taken for a ride and not know it”.
In fact, her restaurant was born out of the idea of increasing her wealth. Caperberry seems to be doing good business, it was full for lunch on the weekday we were there. It is the first in a series of planned restaurant launches by Avant Garde Hospitality, the company she has founded with well-known Bangalore chef Abhijit Saha.

... contd.