The facts are compelling. Indian-Americans are now CEOs of some of the world's largest and best known global technology companies, including Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Harman and Bose, and directors and senior executives at Google, Cisco, HP and other leading companies. It's not too far-fetched to say that most technology companies would feel great pain or even shut down if their Indians went home! The big question is, what drives the rise and success of Indian-Americans in technology? Some have said that it's our perseverance and work ethic: this cannot be the full answer since Chinese-American and other immigrant entrepreneurs share these qualities too. Others say it's our humility: I have found that Indians are generally no more humble than their non-Indian peers! So, I'd like to offer a different hypothesis. We are the 1%, at least in technology. For those of us who came from India, the rigorous process by which we were admitted to the IITs and other top engineering colleges was an effective Darwinian pre-selection process that enabled us to get graduate student visas to the US, earn degrees at the best engineering and business schools here, and then start our technology companies or join other companies with a clear advantage. I'm convinced that even if all the faculty at the IITs retired, the students would still do well simply because they are the best and brightest India has to offer: they are intellectually curious and will learn what they need to on their own. The next generation born in the US benefits from the values of their parents, learns the importance of a great education, especially in engineering and business, and repeats this cycle. India's IT services companies are a great incubator. Even though our IT services companies in India are doing very well, they develop woefully little proprietary intellectual property, which is normally the sign of a truly great company. However, they do a great job of skilling hundreds of thousands of engineers in the basics of software and give them valuable work experience in using and integrating some of the world's best software technology and applications. When these software engineers come to the US, they have a significant advantage because they are well prepared to develop new ideas, intellectual property and software products for their US technology companies that are, in fact, IP-centric. India's loss is Google's gain! Product is king and software trumps hardware. There was a time when technology companies could be run by CEOs with marketing, sales, manufacturing or financial backgrounds. That world is gone. Today, product is everything and software rules. Twenty years ago, the focus of technology was manufacturing-centric, dominated by Chinese-Americans. Today it's about social, mobile, analytics, cloud - all software enabled. Google and Facebook were built into great companies by CEOs with a passion for software and web products; everything else was secondary. The strength of Indian-Americans in software engineering, their ability to communicate clearly in English, and their ability to address design and business problems with structured thinking, is a huge advantage. The world of technology is now a world of continuous disruption. Competitors lurk in every corner, funded by aggressive venture capitalists. Markets are chaotic, breakthrough technologies are a constant threat. Opportunities for monetizing products can be ephemeral. No one deals with chaos better than Indians: we are born, and grow up, in its midst; we drive in cities where drivers don't understand the concept of traffic lanes or any driving rules; we survive our complex political democracy; we deal with our social system and manage inter-personal issues with patience; we find ways to compromise; and thrive in the midst of this chaos. There's no better social preparation for success in technology. With all these drivers of Indian-American progress and success, and with the growing population of Indian-American technology entrepreneurs, executives and engineers, we should not be surprised that the best of the best rise to become CEOs of the greatest technology companies in the world. We should be proud of India in creating and nurturing such extraordinary talent. We should be proud of the US in making such extraordinary opportunities possible to immigrants. Most of all, we should be proud of the Indian-Americans who have worked so hard and achieved so much. The author is a Silicon Valley veteran, a serial entrepreneur, and the founder of the Symphony Technology Group
-TOI
Desis are rising up the technology ladder
The number of Indians in the top management of leading global technology companies and contributing to some great technology advances may surprise many. Consider these: four out of Google's 13-member management team are Indians - Nikesh Arora, Sundar Pichai, Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vic Gundotra - all reporting directly to CEO Larry Page. Pichai's the man behind Chrome and Android; Gundotra, the person behind Google+.
Intel has Arvind Sodhani among the top seven in its executive leadership. But over the decades it also has had Indian brains behind some of its biggest technology products - Vinod Dham and Avtar Saini were key to the Pentium chip, Ajay Bhat invented the USB.
Cisco's Padmasree Warrior lays down the company's technology roadmap as CTO. VMware, the company that pioneered the technology called virtualization that made cloud-computing possible, has four Indians in its 18-member executive leadership - Raghu Raghuram, Shekar Ayyar, Sanjay Poonen and Sanjay Mirchandani. EMC, the $22-billion data storage, analytics and cloud computing company, has three Indians among its 16 business executives; some are distinguished engineers and fellows, the highest ranks in the tech ladder.
"There weren't so many Indians at the top even in 2007 when I joined EMC," says Sarv Saravanan, senior veep and MD of EMC India's R&D centre.
A couple of things have happened. One, the large number of Indians who moved to the US for higher education in the past two decades have risen up the ranks, and in some cases very rapidly because they came with the excellent background of institutions like the IITs.
Two, almost every major technology company established an R&D centre in India in the past decade, attracted by the sea of engineering talent. Many of these have grown to become the second-largest R&D operations for those companies, accounting for at least 20% of their engineering strengths; many within these operations have become highly qualified, and there's now a near seamless movement of these technology executives between India and the US headquarters.
"India has become a breeding ground for global talent. Just over the past two weeks we were discussing how to create more global leaders out of here," says Saravanan, indicating the India phenomenon in global technology companies was only going to get bigger. Saravanan now has the additional responsibility of China, and also interacts with sales teams across Asia-Pacific to create new opportunities.
Cisco R&D demonstrates this best. Some of its senior-most talent, including Wim Elfrink, Faiyaz Shahpurwala and Anil Menon, moved to India to establish a powerful base here. When Elfrink came in 2007, there was one vice-president. Today, there are some 20-plus veep and senior veep positions.
Niranjan Maka, MD of VMware India R&D, says Indians' comfort with software make them adapt very fast to changes in technology, which has kept them in good stead at a time when the world has moved rapidly to mobile devices and cloud computing. "We are also exposed to living in a hybrid culture and hence adapt very easily to an adopted environment. We can communicate extremely well, and in English - the lingua franca of modern business," he says.
-TOI
The analytical Indians
In 2003, the US department of immigration and naturalization services began administering an intelligence test as part of its new immigrant survey (NIS). The test was called 'digital span', and it involved the examiners reading out lengthening sequences of numbers. Test takers were required to repeat the numbers in reverse. The test was administered to immigrant children of all nationalities, and the results were normalized into IQ scores. White Americans scored an average of 100; Ashkenazi Jews, known for their intelligence, scored an average of 110; Indian Americans scored 112.
Consider the numbers: 71% of Indian-Americans had at least a bachelor's degree as of 2010, against a US national average of 28%. As per the 2010 US census, two-thirds of Indians in the US were in professional or managerial jobs; the US average is 36%. The path to US citizenship for Indians is very different from the days of AK Mozumdar, who in 1913 had to convince a judge that he was of Caucasian origin. Indian-Americans are considered America's model minority, given their demographic and the fact that they have the lowest crime rates among all communities. But that is hardly surprising when one looks at the kind of people who emigrate to the US.
In October 2013, the private equity research firm Pitchbook released a list of universities, ranked on the basis of the number of alumni who had received a first round of VC funding. Unsurprisingly, Stanford University was at the top, followed by the University of California, Berkeley, UPenn, Harvard and others. Rounding the list, ahead of big names like Yale and Columbia, in 10th place were the IITs. Flipkart's co-founder Sachin Bansal is not surprised. "Indians, especially IITians, have always been deeply involved in the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley, both as founders and early employees. IITs attract the top minds in the country - pushing them to excel among their highly-talented peers," he says. "IIT is a global brand now, and when you have an IIT tag, a lot of doors open for you. You get an opportunity to be in front of people who matter," says Naveen Tewari, InMobi's founder and an alumnus of IIT-Kanpur.
In the 70s and 80s, institutions like the IITs and BITS Pilani sent wave after wave of highly intelligent, well-educated students into American universities. Names like Vinod Dham, Kanwal Rekhi and Vinod Khosla became Silicon Valley lore. They were instrumental in changing the Indian stereotype from the convenience store-keepers and motel owners to tech-savvy nerds. The premier engineering colleges were followed by others, each carving out its own niche on the backs of illustrious alumni - Manipal University's glee at Satya Nadella's ascension to the Microsoft throne being the latest example.
Before they became engineers and doctors, Indian students went to the US to become teachers and researchers. Prof Shiraz Naval Minwalla is an alumnus of IIT-Kanpur and Princeton University; he taught physics at Harvard University and is now professor at the department of theoretical physics in the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. "Things like the faculty, the quality of interactions between faculty and students, and among students, make all the difference in a university. On that count, India has no university that can compare with the likes of Harvard and Princeton. So Indians who study in good US universities become exceptional performers," he says. Prof Shrinivas Kulkarni went to the US in 1978, and has been teaching astronomy and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology since 1985. "There is still virtue in academic success in India. In the US, schools offer theatre, sports, arts, social work, and they value all of that; it's not just academics," he says. "This is a system that values education, scientific curiosity and, above all, a deep respect for learning for its own sake. The unique thing about an academic career is that it is a lifelong pursuit of all three," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam, a professor of cognitive and information science at the University of California-Merced, explaining the lure of the American university.
In 1999, University of California-Berkeley professor Anna Lee Saxenian found Indian-Americans were responsible for 7% of Silicon Valley startups between 1980 and 1998. By 2007, the number had gone up to 13.4% of Valley startups, and 6.5% of US startups. In 2012, as a result of recession and other factors, the overall volume of entrepreneurship dropped in the US. But Indians were still going strong: 8% of all US startups were founded by Indian-Americans. Their share of Silicon Valley startups also rose from 13.4% to 14%. "Indians are achieving extraordinary success in Silicon Valley," writes Neesha Bapat, a researcher on Silicon Valley at Stanford.
-TOI
Hard work, initiative and hunger pushed Indians to scale heights
Satya Nadella's elevation as CEO of Microsoft marks the acme of global corporate leadership attained in recent years by first generation Indian immigrants. While Indra Nooyi at Pepsico, Vikram Pandit at CitiBank (who has since stepped down), Ajay Banga at Mastercard, and Anshu Jain at Deutsche Bank have already scaled the dizzy heights, Nadella's ascension was a landmark event given Microsoft's high profile and its close association with India, fuelled in part by a large section of its workforce being of Indianorigin. (The figure of 33 per cent Microsofties being of Indian origin is hyperbolic; it is less than 10 per cent, and from what Bill Gates told this correspondent several years back, it is about 20 per cent in the engineering division.)
The story of India's/Indian/Indian-American contribution to technology is not new; it goes back at least couple of decades, possibly more. Back in the 1990s, when I was working on a book that was eventually titled The Horse That Flew: How India's Silicon Gurus Spread Their Wings, a librarian who was helping me with research would pull my leg about India having invented zero ("THE zero,'' I'd correct her), as we scoured the archives for stories about Indians in the science and technology fields.
The idea for the book was triggered by then "hot male'' Sabeer Bhatia's sale of Hotmail to Microsoft for $ 400 million. Shortly before that, Vinod Dham had been instrumental in launching the Pentium chip, and Ram Shriram (who would later fund Google and become a billionaire) was a key figure in Netscape, the early browser favorite. Years before, Narendra Singh Kapany had done pioneering work in fiber optics, C. Kumar Patel for cutting edge work on lasers, Arun Netravali led the team that developed high-definition television (HDTV), and Praveen Chaudhari held patents for the erasable read-write compact discs, the kind you burned music on a generation back. I chronicled several such stories in my book.
However, Indians in the management and corporate side of things was a different deal altogether. There was the inevitable talk of a glass ceiling, and it was rare that an Indian went on to become CEO of a company, although several, like Vinod Khosla, Umang Gupta, and Kanwal Rekhi, had founded companies and even helmed them briefly. White-dominated America was leery of showing a minority face at the helm. It was only in the nifty noughties (2000 onwards) that things began to change, in keeping with the changing demographics and ethos of the US itself, and the self-belief and critical mass Indians attained, riding on the exploits of the pioneers.
In 2004, Surya Mohapatra, an alumnus of Sambalpur University and Regional Engineering College-Rourkela, his Odiya accent untainted by decades in the US, was appointed CEO of Quest Diagnostics, a Fortune 500 company. Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi, who went to one of her first interviews in the US in a sari after her professor advised her to "be yourself,'' was elevated at PepsiCo in 2006. Nagpur-born Vikram Pandit at Citibank, Francisco D'Souza, son of an Indian diplomat, at Cognizant, and Adobe System's Shantanu Narayen, like Nadella a Hyderabad native, all scaled the top in 2007. Ravi Saligram at OfficeMax and Sanjay Mehrotra at SanDisk would make the grade by the end of the decade, when there were at least ten CEOs of Indian origin in the Fortune 500. The numbers compared favorably with Blacks (six CEOs), Hispanics (eight), and other Asian-Americans including Chinese, all of whose population was several times larger than that of Asian-Indians in the US.
There were several reasons attributed for this success by a number of experts I spoke to. They ranged from the Indian comfort with English and ease with numbers, to the fact that most Indian immigrants came from the relatively creamy layer of Indian society (although several achievers spoke to me about the tough grind they went through in India, from studying by candle light to walking miles to school). It all boiled down to hard work, initiative, and a hunger for success, topped off with some luck, in an American ecosystem that recognized merit better than in India.
But fundamentally, it also went back to a society that manages the paradox of at once being religious and superstitious and at the same time fostering a scientific temper and a spirit of inquiry; or at a higher level, balancing science and spirituality. For instance, India is very familiar with Swami Vivekananda and his epic tour of America to address the Congress of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Less well known is Vivekananda's extensive engagement, pursuant to his interest in science and spirituality, with Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, the pioneers of all things electric.
A decade or so later, a young man named Gobind Behari Lal, a nephew of the Indian nationalist Lala Hardayal, left India to come to the University of California-Berkeley, on a scholarship. Following his post-doc, he joined Hearst Newspapers as a "science writer,'' the first time the designation was used in an American newspaper. In a career that lasted more than half a century, he interviewed such formidable scientific titans as Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi and Max Planck, winning a Pulitzer Prize (1937) on the way, the first for an Indian-American (Jhumpa Lahiri would come decades later, much after Lal died in 1982). His work inspired a generation of Indian-Americans who streamed into the sciences and technology.
Little of this was known in India, which on account of its own constricting policies and a lack of opportunity, gave up some of its best and brightest to the US, which on its part used its immigration policy to attract them. From 1965 onwards, when immigration rules were relaxed for Indians, more than a million educated Indians have streamed into the US for "higher studies,'' many of them staying behind to become "Indian-Americans,'' and often, particularly in case of their children, just "Americans.'' Few who have been in the US for more than 20-25 years and who have taken US citizenship bear any allegiance to India, and many of them find the media hysteria in India over their achievements quite cringe-worthy.
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