Indian-origin CEOs have been a formidable force on the American tech scene. Parag Agarwal's ascension as CEO of Twitter is the latest in a string of nominations of Indian executives for top positions at high-profile US tech companies.
As our chart shows, Twitter is a small tech player when it comes to market cap, but the social network's social impact is undeniable. Agarwal has worked at the company since 2011, most recently as Chief Technology Officer.
Due to the popularity of technical degrees in India, as well as the high quality education facilities in the country, Indian tech CEOs often have programming or engineering backgrounds, sometimes with additional MBAs or other business degrees. Parag Agarwal is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai and Stanford University, while Sundar Pichai, CEO of the much larger Google parent Alphabet, went to IIT Kharagpur and Stanford before earning an MBA from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania.
Satya Nadella, who chairs the most valuable company of the bunch – Microsoft, is also an engineer (from MIT Manipal) who is an MBA recipient, as is Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan, who previously attended the College of Engineering at Osmania University in Hyderabad. had attended Eventually obtained an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM, remained on the technical side and attended IIT Kanpur before obtaining a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois.
Narayan and Nadella were named among the world's top 10 best-performing CEOs by Harvard Business Review in 2019, along with India-born MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga and Taiwan-born Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who topped the rankings. Were.
Other Indian-origin CEOs of US tech companies include Sanjay Mehrotra of memory and storage company Micron ($96B market cap), Nikesh Arora of cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks ($54B market cap), cloud service provider VMware Raghu Raghuram ($51B). market cap) or Vimeo's Anjali Sood ($3b market cap).