This is a beautiful article about 10 Indian who changed the world for the advantage of the human kind. Posting it in this blog to read and lead.
TOP 10 INDIAN-AMERICAN ENTREPRENEURS OF ALL TIME
Over 200 years after the revolutionary formation of the United States by European immigrants, immigrants to the U.S.A. continue to revolutionize both America and the world. As entrepreneurs, corporate leaders and other professionals create new wealth, America is witnessing the boon of a next generation of mega families – families whose wealth is not tied to industrial growth, but instead, those who have amassed their fortunes in the throes of the technological and information revolutions that have catalyzed the globe into an exponentially evolving and inter-connected network – one moving increasingly rapidly toward an “internet of things”. The following list presents (in no particular order) the top 10 American entrepreneurs of Indian origin who have trail-blazed paths to thriving businesses with resounding impact, and in so doing, represent a new strain of the American elite.1. “I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by MBAs. But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn’t been done before.” ~ Amar Ghopal Bose
Amar Bose was born in 1929 in Philadelphia. Amar’s father was a Bengali freedom fighter who immigrated to the United States in 1920, where he married an American schoolteacher of French and German ancestry. Amar enrolled in M.I.T. in 1947, where he ultimately earned his Ph.D in Electrical Engineering and continued on as a professor for the next 45 years. Amar began his research into acoustics as an engineering student and in 1964 founded the Bose Corp., now an American-household brand for high end, noise-cancelling headphones and loudspeaker technologies. With estimated sales of over $1.7 billion, Bose Corp. is a stalwart of American industry in acoustic technology. Amar’s decision to keep Bose a privately held corporation enabled him to plow most of its profits back into R&D. Amar donated a majority stake in Bose Corp. to M.I.T before his death in 2013 and had an estimated net worth of $1 billion.
2.“A good entrepreneur never gives up.” ~ Sabeer Bhatia
Born in Chandigarh in 1968, Sabeer spent his early years in Bangalore and Pune. His father is a retired captain in the Indian Army and his mother worked with India’s central bank. Sabeer moved to the United States when he was 20 to study at Caltech and later graduated with a Masters in Engineering from Stanford University. Sabeer is most widely credited with creating the world’s first free email service: Hotmail. Sabeer successfully scaled Hotmail to the world’s second largest email provider and sold it to Microsoft for $400 million, making him one of the youngest stars in the Indo-American community in the early 90’s. Sabeer has gone on to form several new ventures.
3. “The key to being a successful entrepreneur is the ability to tolerate pain, face challenges, have the humility to correct oneself midway, if required, and self-belief.” ~ Dr. Gururaj (“Desh”) Despande
Gururaj, a.k.a. Desh, Despande was born in Karnataka, and graduated with a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Madras. Desh moved to Ontario, Canada, where he earned both a Master’s degree and Ph.D and worked at a subsidiary of Motorola that manufactured modems, prior to moving to the United States in 1984. In the U.S., Desh co-founded a router developer company, which he sold for $15 million within three years. A few years later, Desh founded Cascade Communications, whose products were important in routing the early Internet, and in 1997 sold the company for $3.7 billion. Subsequently, with the help of M.I.T. researchers, Desh launched Sycamore Networks in 1998 and took it public 1 year later, raising a market cap of $18 billion. At that time, the Sycamore Networks IPO made Desh one of the wealthiest self-made businessmen in the world. Desh has launched several centers for innovation and is a life member of the Board of Trustees of M.I.T. Corporation.
4.“Every big problem is a big opportunity…And there are plenty of problems in India.” ~ Vinod Khosla
Vinod Khosla was born in 1955, the son of an Indian Army officer in New Delhi, where he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Delhi. Vinod went on to complete a Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA at Stanford in 1980. Two years later, Vinod founded Sun Microsystems, which he left four years later to join the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In 2004, Vinod formed his own venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, which manages over $1 billion in investor capital. Vinod is also one of the founders of TiE, The Indus Entrepreneurs. Vinod has an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion.
5. “Everything’s real-time…Everything’s event-driven. It’s all about the data.” ~ Vivek Ranadivé
Born in Mumbai in 1957, Vivek Ranadivé was accepted to M.I.T. at the age of 16, where he completed his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering. Vivek went on to obtain his MBA from Harvard University in 1983. Vivek started his first company while still in college at M.I.T., and in 1985 received $250,000 in seed capital from a technology incubator to form Teknekrom Software Systems. Vivek set out to build software on the premise of “The Information Bus” (TIB), which allowed for the tight coupling of applications. Through a strategic partnership with Goldman Sachs and Price Waterhouse, TIB architecture was deployed to revolutionize trading floors on Wall Street for real-time international transactions, with TIB-K becoming the first platform for Wall Street trading technology and eventually digitizing all of Wall Street. In 1997, Vivek founded TIBCO with funding from Cisco and Reuters and applied real-time software to other industries, including real-time news of all major sporting events including the NFL, NBA and PGA. Over the next fifteen years, Vivek grew TIBCO to a publicly listed company on NASDAQ with annual revenues of nearly $1 billion. An avid basketball fan, Vivek was the first person of Indian descent to own an NBA franchise and is currently a major investor in the Sacramento Kings. In 2012, Vivek launched TopCom, a private social network for world leaders.
6. “Even though Indians are less than one percent of the U.S. population, they have founded about 15 percent of Silicon Valley startups.” ~ Vinod Dam
Vinod Dham, widely acclaimed as the “Father of the Pentium Chip”, was born in Pune in 1950. Vinod studied Electrical Engineering at Delhi College of Engineering and at the age of 25 came to the U.S. to pursue an MS in Electrical Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. Vinod received a job offer from Intel and in 1990, was in charge of developing the Pentium processor. Following the Pentium processor’s huge success, Vinod rose up the corporate ladder and later quit Intel in 1995, to join a start-up which he then merged with one of Intel’s main competitors. He went on to lead another start-up – this time in the communications processor space – to a lucrative exit at $1.2 billion. Vinod went on to found a venture incubator and cross-border venture capital fund focused on investing in Indian start-ups across various sectors.
7. “Every country has found that the best way to create jobs is to create entrepreneurs who will start and grow companies.” ~ Romesh Wadhwani
Romesh Wadhwani, founder and CEO of Symphony Technology Group, was born in India in 1948, where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Bombay and an MS and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. Romesh joined American Robot as CEO, which he left in 1995 to launch Aspect Development in Silicon Valley. In 2000, at the peak of the Internet bubble, Romesh sold Aspect Development to i2 for $9.3 billion in stock. Romesh next founded a private equity group called Symphony Technology Group to invest in innovative software companies. He sits on the board of The Kennedy Center and has signed The Giving Pledge.
8. “Life is fleeting, and permanence in this world is something we all strive for. The best way to achieve permanence is through philanthropy.” ~ Ram Shriram
Ram Shriram, one of the founding board members of Google, was born Bangalore in 1957 and raised in Chennai, India. He studied at Loyola College in Madras and joined Netscape in 1994 as an early executive. He then became president of Junglee Corporation, an online comparison shopping firm. When Amazon acquired Junglee in 1998, Ram became vice president of business development at Amazon.com. Ram formed Sherpalo Ventures in 2000 to invest in early stage technology companies. Ram is a board trustee at Stanford University. His present estimated net worth is $1.86 billion.
9. “To unleash the innovation potential in the country, we need to tap into the creative energy of our young entrepreneurs.” ~ Sam Pitroda
Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda, popularly known as Sam Pitroda, was born in 1942 in Odisha, India, to parents of Gujarati descent. After obtaining a Master’s degree in Physics in India, Sam immigrated to the U.S. where he obtained a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sam was involved in technology research work in telecommunications and hand-held computing. He is regarded as one of the earliest pioneers of hand-held computing because of his invention of the Electronic Diary in 1975. Sam holds over 15 honorary Ph.Ds and close to 100 worldwide patents, and is credited with revolutionizing India’s telecommunications infrastructure after returning to India in the 1980s, when he founded India’s Telecom Commission.
10. “I don’t know any entrepreneurs who are risk takers. The risk takers are gambling somewhere.” ~ Sanjiv Sidhu
Sanjiv Sidhu was born in 1995 in Hyderabad, India, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering. He then moved to the United States and obtained a MS in Chemical Engineering in 1982. Sanjiv founded i2 Technologies after leaving Texas Instruments, and developed a production optimization product called the Factory Planner. i2 Technologies went public in 1996 with Sanjiv’s holding becoming worth $6.5 billion, making him the richest person of Indian origin in the world at that time. Sanjiv went on to found o9 Solutions, a Texas-based company that has developed a business optimization software product called mPower, which provides real-time internal company data to enhance business performance and operations planning.
Building upon their engineering backgrounds, each of these innovators rode the technological and information waves to create companies of value that generated tremendous wealth and productivity, earning them their place amongst America’s most successful entrepreneurs.
Source: http://dawallstreet.com/2014/10/27/top-10-indian-american-entrepreneurs-of-all-time/
© 2014 DaWall Street Blog. All Rights Reserved.
