"Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is something of a modern business folk hero. She started her own life sciences firm in a garage at the age of 25 on a shoestring of 10,000 Indian Rupees (about 120 US dollars). At that time, the idea of a woman chief executive officer in India was as remote as the idea of an Indian competitor taking away significant market share from the pharmaceutical behemoth Pfizer.
Today, her venture Biocon is a multinational publicly listed pharmaceutical provider in Bangalore. As of 2023, the firm employs more than 23,000 people, offers therapies in the areas of oncology, diabetes, and immunology, and is working hard on a breakthrough oral formulation of insulin. Mazumdar-Shaw has won just about every entrepreneurial award on the planet, and she is recognized as the wealthiest (self-made) woman in India.

Business Change
But that's not what this story is about. It is about what happens next. It is easy to script romantic endings for business legends. She might retire to a private island. She might fancy art or theater and create a charity with her enormous wealth. Or she might do something as surprising as creating another successful firm.
Indeed, she did start again, taking what she had learned about business—and what she had learned about wellness—and applying those lessons to one of the most pressing social problems facing India: the lack of available healthcare for the 15% of the population (nearly half a billion souls) that fall below the poverty line, earning less than 2 US dollars a day."