Reliance Jio Chairman Akash Ambani spoke on the importance of failure, his college regrets and life lessons from his father at the IIT Bombay Techfest.
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00:00My father, one of my biggest inspirations and heroes is always wanted me to be an engineer.
00:07Full disclaimer, I'm not an engineer.
00:09In fact, he was not believing that I was going to come and speak here,
00:12so he sent my wife Shloka, who was kind enough as witness to be here.
00:16You know, I've been obsessed with technology since my father got his first phone in late 2003.
00:23And for me, what technology really does from an obsession of changing languages
00:28on a Siemens S45 phone, what I realized, it's a great equalizer tool.
00:36You know, it crosses the boundaries of demographics, it crosses the boundaries of caste,
00:41it crosses the boundaries of borders.
00:43And you said it, you know, that you come from Bihar and to them,
00:49a geo-service is no different from a service that we have in our top cities.
00:54I always think that you make life through inspirations.
00:58And I was lucky to have my inspirations right at my house in terms of my grandfather,
01:04my father and my mother. And from a very young age, you know,
01:08whilst I was growing up, the talks at home, of course, used to be around what's good for India.
01:16Thinking back to your college years, what is it that you would have done differently?
01:23Hindsight is the greatest tool. No, definitely try to pursue an engineering degree.
01:28I was very fortunate to have a very good college experience.
01:31So when I look back at it, college is the best time of your life.
01:35There's no doubt to me about it.
01:37The couple of things that I would do probably differently is,
01:40I would learn from my classes, but I would learn from my classmates even more.
01:44And I would look at the whole college experience as a wholesome experience.
01:50If I look back today and say what's the best part of college is really the friends I made.
01:58And really focus more on that.
02:02That's something that I would do a little bit differently than what I did in my four years at Brown.
02:09Running a business is like permanently being in a driver's seat, right?
02:13You can't be very, very distracted at all points of times.
02:17From my perspective, I've always said that if you don't enjoy, and as cliched as it sounds,
02:22if you really don't enjoy it, then you're not going to get that.
02:27Don't be afraid of failure. I think that's something that I'm lucky that my parents have been able to guide us
02:36and say that it's okay if you fail. It's important to recognize when it happens
02:41and take those steps to really change that quite quickly and course correct.
02:50What makes us most proud at Jio is the products and services that we roll out,
02:55but the amount of lives that we're changing on a daily basis.
02:59That's what motivates me personally to come to work every morning and try to improve a billion people's lives.
03:11For more information, visit www.fema.gov