Pichai and Nadella Indians now the Biggest Power Players in Silicon Valley

Ever since Indian graduates poured into Silicon Valley in the 1970s and 1980s, talented Indians have broken glass ceilings for immigrants, pushed boundaries of innovation and secured highly visible positions of power.

Today, this rise of Indians and Indian-Americans in the US tech world appears to be at its peak with as many as 15% of startups in Silicon Valley being founded by Indians, according to a 2014 study by Professor Vivek Wadhwa.

The report points out that Indians constituted the greatest number of the immigrant tech-company founders, having founded more startups than the next four groups (from Britain, China, Taiwan, and Japan) combined.

The proportion of Indian-founded startups in Silicon Valley startups has increased from 7% to 15.5% from 1999 to 2012 even though Indians make up just 6% of the Valley’s working population.

“The biggest surprise – or should I say shock – is that Indians are dominating immigrant entrepreneurship. Indians now outnumber the next 7 immigrant groups combined. Our research has shown that they start 32.4 percent of all immigrant-founded startups in the US,” Neesha Bapat, lead researcher, Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University, and co-author of the report, said.

With Sundar Pichai, 43, being named chief executive officer of Google today, and Satya Nadella heading Microsoft, Indians are now poised to dominate the upper echelons of the technology giants as well.

As heads of Microsoft and Google, Nadella and Pichai are easily the most influential Indian business leaders in the word. The two join the ranks of such other notable names as Indra Nooyi, who is chair and chief executive of PepsiCo, and Ajaypal Singh Banga, chief executive of MasterCard.

India-born Pichai was named chief executive officer of Google today as the internet giant unveiled a new corporate structure creating an umbrella company dubbed Alphabet.

Google will remain the biggest company under that umbrella, and will continue to manage some of its best-known products, including its search engine, ads, maps, apps, YouTube and Android system.

In his current role, Pichai oversees product management, engineering and research for Google’s products and platforms. Before that, he was SVP of Google Android, Chrome and Apps, working on consumer products “used by millions of people.

Pichai was part of the team that launched the Chrome browser in 2008 and, prior to that, worked on various search products, including Google Toolbar, Desktop Search, Gadgets, and Google Gears and Gadgets,” according to Business Insider.

In comparison, Nadella is the third CEO in the history of Microsoft. He worked at the company for 20 years before winning the CEO title, as a VP in the company’s business and online services divisions and heading up Microsoft’s cloud computing efforts.

But when it comes to Indians who have bagged enviable positions outside the country, Pichai and Nadella are not alone. There are a number of other not-so-well-known Indians who occupy some of the most prestigious positions in top companies.