Infosys

In 1981, seven engineers gathered with an idea and almost no money. N.R. Narayana Murthy borrowed $250 from his wife, Sudha — money she'd saved herself, working as an engineer. That was the entire founding capital of what would become Infosys.

There was no advantage they could out-invest their way into. No large capital, no political connections, no famous backers. What they had instead was a set of rules Murthy insisted on from day one, when the company was small enough that nobody would have noticed if they'd cut a corner: never bribe an official, even when it cost them contracts. Keep accounts transparent enough that any shareholder could understand them. Treat every employee's stake like it mattered, because eventually, it would.

Growth was slow and often brutal. In 1989, a joint venture the founders had bet heavily on collapsed, and the company came close to folding entirely. Murthy convinced the others to hold on. They did.

The discipline compounded the way capital usually does. Global companies, wary of India's reputation for red tape and unpredictable partners, found in Infosys something rarer than low cost: a company whose numbers they could actually trust. In 1999, Infosys became the first Indian company listed on the Nasdaq. It now employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

The $250 is the part everyone remembers. It's not really the point. Plenty of companies start with nothing and stay nothing. What compounded wasn't the capital — it was the standard. Infosys became valuable not because it was cheap to build, but because from the very first year, it was a company other people could trust with their money.