After Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey resigned on November 29, Chief Technology Officer CTO at Twitter, Parag Agrawal took over. Agrawal, a alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay IIT-B, joins a long and illustrious list of Indian-born techies who are now CEOs of some of the biggest tech companies in the world.
Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011 and has been a CTO since. He holds a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-B and later obtained a PhD in computer science from Stanford. Prior to joining Twitter, he worked with Microsoft, Yahoo, and At&T.
Agrawal is joined by Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Rajeev Suri, and others in the helming of big tech giants in the US, and some of them are ex-IIT students. Here is a look at that list:
Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Google in 2015 and took over Alphabet in 2019. Pichai has a B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur and joined Google in 2004.
Satya Nadella took over Microsoft in 2014, taking over from Steve Ballmer. Nadella is a graduate of the Manipal Institute of Technology and got a B.Tech from there. He holds an MS from Stanford and a Masters in Business Administration MBA from Wharton.
Rajeev Suri joined Nokia in 1995 and became President and CEO in April 2014. He left Nokia last year.
Shantanu Narayen has been CEO of Adobe since 2007. He joined the company in 1998 and served as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Development until 2001. Narayen was appointed Executive VP of Worldwide Products in 2005 and was appointed Chief Operating Officer COO the same year.
In April 2020, Arvind Krishna took over as CEO at IBM, where he had started his career in 1990. He has been named the principal architect of IBM's largest acquisition of $34 billion, and Red Hat Raghu Raghuraman became CEO of VMWare in April 2021. Raghuram had started his career in VMWare in 2003 and he handled VMWare's top products - ESX and vSphere. Raghuram was also VP and GM of VMWare's software-defined data centre.
Nikesh Arora is the CEO of Palo Alto Networks and has been in that position since 2018. Before that, Arora worked in companies like Google and SoftBank. Arora holds a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Banaras Hindu University. He has an MBA from Northeastern University and an MSC from Boston College.
Sanjay Mehrotra is currently CEO of Micron Technology and has served in that role since 2017. He is also the co-founder of SanDisk, and was the president and CEO of San Disk until it was acquired by Western Digital. Anjali Sud is the CEO of Vimeo and has been with the company since 2014. She joined Vimeo as the head of global marketing. Sud has a BSc in finance and management from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
George Kurian is the CEO and President of NetApp, a data storage company. He took over that role in 2015. Kurian studied engineering from IIT Madras but dropped out and took up the same course at Princeton University. Kurian has an MBA from Stanford.
Revathi Advaithi is the CEO of Flex. She is an independent director for the board of directors of Uber and Catalyst.org and is a member of the MIT Presidential CEO Advisory Board. Advaithi holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science and an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management.