Syntel was founded by a married couple, and at its 1997 IPO they still owned almost all of it. Bharat Desai and Neerja Sethi started the company in 1980 in Troy, Michigan. Syntel built and maintained software for Fortune 1000 companies in banking, manufacturing, retail and transportation. Much of the work happened at its Global Development Center in Mumbai. The Year 2000 bug was on every CIO's mind, and companies needed programmers to fix old code before the deadline.

A Couple and a Time Zone

Desai earned an MBA at the University of Michigan and an engineering degree at IIT Bombay. He became Syntel's president and CEO at its formation in 1980. Sethi ran corporate affairs. The model was a blend of staff at client sites in the US and teams in India working while America slept. Syntel was expanding its Mumbai center and opening a new one in Chennai when it filed. The bet was that clients would accept distance for lower cost and around-the-clock work.

Eleven Dollars to Forty-One

Syntel priced at $11 a share in August 1997 and listed on Nasdaq as SYNT. It came through the Y2K rush and the dot-com bust and kept growing as Indian IT outsourcing became mainstream. Desai and Sethi remained major owners for two decades. In 2018 the French IT company Atos agreed to buy Syntel for $41 a share in cash. The deal closed in October 2018, and Syntel's stock left Nasdaq.

Cover: The Trojan Horse Being Dragged into the City of Troy, Giulio Bonasone. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for the Trojan horse entering Troy (Troy, Michigan).