'Even though we were middle class...': Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur explains why top tech CEOs are Indians

Silicon-Valley based start-up founder Dheeraj Pandey believes there are many challenges for someone from India to come to the US and reach the top position in a company, but they still do it. This resilience is exemplified by the likes of Sundar Pichai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and Shantanu Narayen of Adobe. Pandey himself is part of the list. He is the former CEO of Nasdaq-listed tech firm Nutanix, and is currently heading his own start-up DevRev. 

In a conversation with Mukesh Bansal, the founder of Myntra and Cult.Fit, Pandey said that Indians working in the tech space in the US were very focused on achieving their goals.

 "I'd say we are good at minding our own business. Somebody said this recently and I really related to it that the Indians in the US, they're good at minding their own business. The proxy for that is focus," Pandey said in the latest episode of Bansal's podcast SparX. He feels as immigrants there's a lot at stake.   

"You have this single-minded focus because you came to the country with very little in your hand. And the hunger is definitely one thing that continues. First of all, you're being looked at as somebody who's a different colour, maybe you know brown skin. So, you have to prove that you're a good engineer," he said. 

But that's just a start. On the road to the top, a techie has to prove that he or she is not just a good engineer but also good at management, design and product, sales and distribution, according to Pandey.   

"And, finally, you have to prove that you can take a company public and you can be a public company - you can communicate, you can inspire, you can motivate. So, like all immigrants, I think we've had to prove a lot along the way, so there's a little bit of that hunger," Pandey, who is also a current board member at Adobe, explained. 

Pandey had co-founded Nutanix in 2009 and retired from the company as the CEO in 2020. During his stint, he led the company to a successful IPO in 2016. Nutanix's market cap is $13.72 billion at present (7 February 2024). 

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Soon after retiring from Nutanix, Pandey co-founded DevRev with Manoj Agarwal, an ex-colleague at Nutanix. The business software company says its mission is to connect "makers (Dev) to customers (Rev)". The investors in DevRev include a number of Indian-origin personalities such as Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla, Lightspeed Ventures' MD Ravi Mhatre and Mayfield Fund MD Navin Chaddha, among others.    

Pandey praised the Indian education system and the middle-class value system which allowed Indians such as himself to compete in the US. "I was at this summit recently talking about US-India Corridor. I feel like there was a foundation that IITs gave you, Indian education gave you, English education gave you. Even though we were kind of lower middle-class, middle-class folks, there was bunch of ethos around hard work. And, then you take that to IITs, then from there you go to the US, and then US gave you something more," he said. 

Pandey also mentioned how his previous company Nutanix had expanded operations in India.  

"We had more than 2,000 people working in India and we were spending more than $100 million in R&D here [India] alone. We came here 10 years ago in 2013 and I feel like it's not just a way of giving back, but also to thank what this country actually has given us. In those early years, $300 a semester kind of education, right. So it feels complete, it's like the clocks turned a full circle," he said. 

The former Nutanix CEO  seems to be following a similar trajectory with his new firm DevRev. The tech company has operations in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Chennai.  

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