Interview Summary
Jerry Rao is the current chairman of the Value and Budget Housing Corporation and is the founder and former CEO of MphasiS Corporation. In this interview, Rao discusses his career trajectory, beginning with Citibank in 1984. He discusses the challenges of opening a foreign bank in India and how the foreign exchange shortage in Indian helped propel Citibank’s success in India. He eventually moved to California to head Citibank’s technology department. Rao fully transitioned to the technology industry in 1997 when he and his partners developed a software for banks to provide their services online, MphasiS. He discusses the challenges of starting a technology company in California during a time in which most computer programmers were in India. He also details his decision to sell the company in 2007, foreseeing the industry becoming concentrated in large corporations.
In 2009, Rao founded two companies—Value and Budget Housing Corporation and a mortgage finance company—after realizing India’s housing industry had no large, reliable company to build affordable housing. He discusses the challenges of India’s many regulations and required construction permits and how the company manages to stay profitable despite the slow building process. He also details how he believes a company can best embrace social responsibility through employee volunteer time, and how and why he came to publish a book of poetry.
It’s getting better, but it’s nowhere near where it should be if we want to provide... homes..., if we want to give our fellow citizens a minimum level of dignity, which I think they deserve.
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Additional Resources
Vinod Mahanta, "Quitting Citibank was the most defining bet of my career: Jerry Rao, Former CEO, MphasiS,"The Economic Times, April 13, 2012.
"Delhi-NCR has highest unsold housing inventory: Assocham,"
The Economic Times, May 5, 2016.
Shloka Nath, "Jerry Rao's Fourth Act,"
Forbes India, May 18, 2009.
Value Budget Housing Corporation.
"Jerry Rao: Diaspora and Entrepreneurship in the Global Economy,"[HBS Case]
Interview Citation Format
"Interview with Jaithirth (Jerry) Rao interviewed by Geoffrey Jones, June 1, 2016, Creating Emerging Markets Project, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, http://www.hbs.edu/creating-emerging-markets/."
