Here are five other Indians apart from Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, who’ve made it big in Silicon Valley:
Rashmi
Sinha, CEO – Slideshare
Rashmi Sinha is a
co-founder of SlideShare – an website for viewing and sharing Office documents
online and converting PowerPpint slides into video. Rashmi Sinha grew up in
Allahabad, is a PhD from Brown University and earned a post-doctorate in
cognitive neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. She then gave
up academia to start SlideShare with her husband. In an interview with Inc, she says “I’d rather we make a mistake,
realize we did, and try something else instead of spending a lot of time
thinking and not acting.” She was named as World’s Top 10 Women
Influencers in Web 2.0 by Fast Company in 2008.
Vinod
Khosla, Co-founder – Sun Microsystems
Image:
Khosla Labs
An IIT Delhi graduate,
Vinod Khosla is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems – the company which invented
Java programming language. He is also known for his work in high-speed optical
networks. In the book, Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom
Heist, he is said to have conceived the idea of a hardware box which would
enable SONET over optical networks in order to handle large amounts of voice
and data. Thus, he founded Cerent, a telecommunications company, which was
later acquired by Cisco. He also played an instrumental role in launching
Juniper Networks.
Amit
Singhal, Senior VP – Google
While Sundar Pichai is
known to be Google’s blue-eyed boy, Amit Singhal is the company’s lesser known
jewels who heads its core ranking team. It’s this team which controls how
search results appear on the search engine. According to Wired,
he rewrote the algorithm of the Google search engine in 2001, which earned him
the “Google Fellow” title – a title reserved for its best engineers. Born and
raised in Uttar Pradesh, Singhal is a Computer Science graduate from IIT
Roorkee and went on to complete his M.S from the University of Minnesota
Duluth.
Shantanu
Narayen, President and CEO – Adobe
After working for
top-notch tech firms such as Apple and Silicon Graphics, India-born Shantanu
Narayen handles Adobe’s day-to-day global operations, product research and
development, marketing and corporate development. According to Business Week, He also led the $1.8 billion
acquisition of Omniture and serves as one of the board of directors for companies
such as Dell and Pfizer other than Adobe Systems. Mr. Narayen studied
Electronics Engineering from Osmania University in Hyderabad, before moving to
the United States to acquire a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Bowling
Green State University and Master’s Degree in Business Administration from the
Haas School of Business.
Padmasree
Warrior CTO – Cisco
A Chemical Engineer
from IIT Delhi and Cornell University, Padmasree Warrior was the Chief Technology
Officer (CTO) of Motorola before becoming the CTO of networking-equipment
manufacturer Cisco Systems. Born and raised in Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh,
Warrior is expected to be the successor of Cisco CEO John Chambers. She
currently oversees partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, and new technologies
at Cisco.
Sources:
Forbes, Times of India, TechRepublic, Wikipedia
