He also displayed an earlier penchant for strategy and having a mind of his own. Everyone in his family wanted him to pursue a different career - his father wanted him to take over the family business, his mother wanted him to go into management, his sister wanted him to join the civil service. Nigam made it to all the institutions, but hid the results from the family.

Meanwhile, he applied for a scholarship to University of Wisconsin, Madison, for a masters in computer sciences after getting his bachelors in electronics from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1980. He informed his family about how he fared in all the other endeavours at the airport before boarding the flight to the U.S. "because it was too late for them to stop me leaving." Healtheon, founded in February 1996, is the first of its kind end-to-end healthcare provider from the IT perspective and Nigam ended up there almost naturally after being with Clark since his Silicon Graphics days in the late 1980s.

Healtheon says its mission is to leverage advanced Internet technology to connect all participants in healthcare and enable them to exchange information and perform transactions which cut across the healthcare maze.

This May, Healtheon merged with Web MD, then acquired Medi- America and Atlanta-based Med Cast to complete a four-way merger that Nigam says puts the company in a unique position in the healthcare industry. Healtheon provides the application services, Med Cast provides the content in terms of news on health issues, Medi America provides the back-end connectivity into laboratories and pharmacies and Web MD has the marketing and business capability. While Healtheon may have a dozen competitors, none provides the all-round healthcare services that this new $10 billion company can. When Nigam came to Silicon Valley in 1982, a fresh graduate from Madison, he joined Intel at Sunnyvale, California. In that era, he told India Abroad News Service, "hardware engineers were king. Being a software engineer was still being a support element.

This is the era of the software engineer." Those were "crazy times," he says. He was 22 when he went to the valley and "craziness means there's no status quo and you might end up being at the top of the heap rather than at the bottom." And that is how he seems to have fared. From Intel, Nigam moved to Silicon Graphics started by Clark.

He was there for seven years after joining as general manager of the software division in 1989. In 1994, he was put in charge of a prized Time Warner project for an interactive television experiment in Orlando - to reach 4,000 customers for a three- year period.

Nigam put together some 100 people, there were no rules, an unlimited budget and all the glamour of the entertainment world crowding around the team, including Michael Jackson. He finished the project by the end of 1994 and "technically it was a huge success. But it was killed by the Internet," he adds, as everybody moved from interactive television to the growing computer medium. When Clark left Silicon Graphics and started Netscape, Nigam was still toiling with Time Warner's interactive television. He watched "with envy," he says, as Netscape took off and all he did was buy a couple of thousand stocks in the new company before taking off for a sabbatical to India. "That was the easiest money I ever made," he says.

When he got back in October 1995, Clark asked him to join a discussion on the Internet and healthcare. He did, and was sold on trying to build an empire based on the trillion dollar health industry. Because of Clark and Nigam's reputation, companies were willing to back the new venture. Today, Healtheon/WebMD has 1,800 employees, is headquartered in Santa Clara, with offices in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Portland, Buffalo and a few other cities.

To those with dreams of making it big in IT, Nigam says, "It's the best time to be in Silicon Valley. This is the centre of the universe now. As close to the epicentre as it gets."