The Rise of the Global Tech Indian

Vinod Khosla and Vinod Dham were among the earliest Indian names which became famous in Silicon Valley. Since then, the number of global Indians in tech has been mushrooming.

DQ has also been covering their achievements regularly and making lists much before the current fad. In fact, as far as listicles go, our Top 20 list was the first such that used to go viral in the 1980s. The February 15, 2012, cover story presented: The most influential global Indians in technology. There are some names that are familiar today and some not that much.

Satya Nadella was President, of servers & tools, at Microsoft and since then moved to head that organization. Sundar Pichai was in Google as SVP, Chrome, and moved on to heading Google/Alphabet.

Nikesh Arora was Chief Business Officer at Google and since then became President of Softbank and is currently CEO of Palo Alo Networks. Thomas Kurian was EVP, of product development at Oracle and now heads Google Cloud. Vishal Sikka was CTO and a member, exec board at SAP and he had a stint heading Infosys after that. Of course, Vinod Khosla was a legend then and continues to be active today.

The future is AI and recently the American Time magazine released a list of “The 100 most influential people in Artificial Intelligence” called the Time 100/AI. As expected, there were a lot of Indians and people of Indian origin on the list. Here’s those who made that list…

•    Anna Makanju, VP Global Affairs OpenAI.
•   Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor, Prof. & PhD candidate, Princeton.
•   Kalika Bali, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research India.
•   Manu Chopra, CEO Karya.
•   Neal Khosla, CEO & Co-Founder, CURAI.
•   Pushmeet Kohli, VP of Research, Google Deepmind.
•    Romesh & Sunil Wadhwani, Co-founders, Wadhwani AI.
•   Rumman Chowdhury, CEO & Founder, Humane Intelligence.
• Sarah Chander, Sr Policy Adviser, European Digital Rights.
• Sneha Revanur, Founder & Prez, Encode Justice.
•   Tushita Gupta, Co-Founder & CTO, Refiberd.

All these lists of Indian and Indian-origin stars in the tech field will continue to lengthen in the coming decades.