Indian techies conquer US Silicon Valley

Almost all big US companies have engineers and executives of Indian descent, including the father of the USB and the Pentium processor

Ever since waves of Indian graduates poured into Silicon Valley in Northern California in the 1970s and 1980s, talented Indians have made breakthroughs, pushed boundaries and held positions of power in the world of technology and media.

Almost all the big US technology companies have technology pioneers of Indian descent, including the fathers of the USB and technology blogging.

AJAY BHATT

One of the most unsung technology pioneers is Ajay Bhatt, an Indian-American computer architect who is credited as being the father of the USB standard. Born in 1957, Bhatt graduated from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in India and then went on to receive a master’s degree from The City University of New York before joining Intel in 1990.

He became Intel’s chief client platform architect, but not before co-inventing USB, as well as several other crucial standards in graphics and computer architecture holding 31 US patents. Intel’s ‘Rockstars’ of technology advert featured an actor portraying the father of the USB, Ajay Bhatt.

VINOD DHAM

The father of the famous Intel Pentium processor, Vinod Dham, originally hailed from Pune. He specialised in solid state electronics — the technology underlaying the storage found in every smartphone and tablet computer as well as many laptops — working on flash memory at NCR Corporation before joining Intel. Dham left Intel in 1995 ending up at Intel’s largest rival in the computer chip business AMD, before moving onto a series of startups and then becoming a venture capitalist focused on early stage startups in India.

VINOD KHOSLA

Born in 1955 in Delhi, Khosla was inspired into a career in technology by reading about the founding of Intel in 1968 at the age of 14. He gained a degree in electrical engineering from the IIT Delhi before moving to the US to obtain a masters in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a masters from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1980. In 1980, Khosla joined Daisy Systems before leaving in 1982 to co-found Sun Microsystems along with Stanford alumni Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, as well as Bill Joy.

Khosla joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture capital firm, as a general partner in 1987 investing in technology firms and Indian finance companies. Khosla then left the company in 2004 to start his own venture capitalist firm, Khosla Ventures, which manages around $1bn of investment capital and invests in clean technology and information technology startups.

SUNDAR PICHAI

One of Nadella’s suggested rivals for the job of Microsoft’s chief executive was Sundar Pichai, currently the man overseeing Android, Chrome and apps at Google.

Born in Tamil Nadu in 1972, Pichai attained a degree in technology from IIT Kharagpur before gaining masters degrees from both Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Pichai worked at technology company Applied Materials and consultancy firm McKinsey & Company before joining Google in 2004. When the father of Android, Andy Rubin, move away from Android to take up the lead of Google’s robotics efforts, Pichai was given oversight of the Android mobile software in 2013.

SABEER BHATIA

Another pioneering web service, Hotmail, was founded by an Indian technology talent who emigrated to the US in the 1980s.

Born in 1968 in Chandigarh, Bhatia moved to the US in 1988 to study at the California Institute of Technology transferring from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science.

Bhatia linked up with a colleague, Jack Smith, to launch Hotmail in 1996, which became one of the biggest email providers in the world and was bought by Microsoft in 1998. In 1999, Bhatia then left Microsoft and founded an e-commerce firm, Arzoo Inc, before starting a free messaging service called JaxtrSMS.

AMIT SINGHAL

Amit Singhal oversees Google’s core business of search — something around 1.1 billion people use every month.

Bor n in 1968 in Jhansi, Singhal g ained a computer science degree from IIT Roorkee in 1989 before moving to the US and receiving a masters from the University of Minnesota in 1991. Singhal continued his academic career at Cornell University attaining a doctorate in 1996 and working with the father of digital search, Gerad Salton. He moved to Google in 2000 to join his friend.

Singhal now oversees search for Google, responsible for the algorithms that deliver search results, and rewrote Google’s search engine in 2001.

RUCHI SANGHVI

Born in 1982 in Pune, Ruchi Sanghvi became Facebook’s first female engineer, joining the social network in 2005.

At Facebook, Sanghvi was one of the primary engineers working on the first iteration of what was set to become the mainstay of Facebook, the News Feed. Later that year, Sanghvi was made a principal product manager at Facebook, overseeing the company’s software platform as well as the News Feed, but left Facebook in 2010.

SHANTANU NARAYEN

Shantanu Narayen, born in 1963 in Hyderabad, currently serves as Adobe Systems chief executive; a software and services company the develops the world famous Photoshop among other products. Narayen started computer graphics career at Apple before moving to Silicon Graphics to be director of desktop collaboration products. In 1998, Narayen started his 16-year career at Adobe, joining the company as vice-president of worldwide product research. He was later promoted to executive vicepresident before becoming chief operating officer of the company in 2005 at the age of 41.