Satya Nadella on growing up middle-class in India. Watch interview with LinkedIn CEO

Satya Nadella was appointed the CEO of Microsoft in 2014.

In a recent conversation with LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella spoke about how his childhood in India shaped his professional journey.

The son of an IAS officer and a Sanskrit professor, Satya Nadella was born in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh in 1967. After completing his schooling at Hyderabad Public School, famous for producing a legion of notable alumni, Nadella studied electrical engineering at Manipal Institute of Technology. He then moved to the US for his master’s in computer science.

Satya Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992, kick-starting a 30-year journey in a company where he is today the CEO. He devoted the first few minutes of his chat with Roslansky to speak about growing up in India. He credited his parents for allowing him the room to discover his passions.

“My parents played a massive role in who I am today,” said the CEO of Microsoft. “My father was a civil servant, an economist, and my mother was a Sanskrit professor. They were exact opposites of each other in some sense, they could not agree on anything, except giving me lots of room and a lot of confidence to become my own person, pursue my own passions.”

Nadella said he was never academically inclined and instead preferred to spend his time playing cricket. But he remembers the first time he ever used a computer.

“Growing up middle class in India, that sort of sometimes is challenging. But one of the interesting things I distinctly remember is American technology. I remember the first I started using a computer,” he said, adding it was the “malleability of software” that got him hooked.

After completing his master’s in computer science, Nadella joined Sun Microsystems – a brief stint at a legendary company that nevertheless solidified his strong foundation in computer science.

Nadella also addressed a host of other topics during his conversation with LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky, which was part of Roslansky’s ‘The Path’ series where he interviews some of the biggest changemakers in business today.

He spoke about his career trajectory and the three decades he has spent at Microsoft, saying: “There was never a time where I thought the job I was doing, all through my 30 years of Microsoft, that somehow I was doing that as a way to some other job. I felt the job I was doing there was the most important thing. I genuinely felt it.”