From Parag Agrawal to Sundar Pichai: The Indian takeover of Big Tech

After Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey resigned on November 29, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Twitter, Parag Agrawal, took over. Agrawal, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B), joins the long and illustrious list of Indian-born techies who are now the CEOs of some of the biggest tech companies globally.

Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011 and has served as CTO since. He has 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 also worked with Microsoft, Yahoo, and At&T.

Agrawal joins the likes of Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Rajeev Suri, and others in helming big tech giants in the US and some of them are also ex-IIT students. Here’s a look at that list:

Sundar Pichai

Chennai-born Sundar Pichai became Google CEO in 2015 and took over Alphabet in 2019. Pichai has a B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur and joined Google in 2004.

Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella took over Microsoft in 2014 taking over from Steve Ballmer. Nadella is a Manipal Institute of Technology alumnus and he got a BE from there. He also has an MS from Stanford and a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from Wharton.

Rajeev Suri

Rajeev Suri joined Nokia in 1995 and became President and CEO in April 2014. He left Nokia last year.

Shantanu Narayen

Shantanu Narayen has been Adobe CEO since 2007. He joined the company in 1998 and served as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Development till 2001. Narayen became Executive VP of Worldwide Products then and served in that role till 2005 and was appointed as Chief Operating Officer (COO) the same year.

Arvind Krishna

Arvind Krishna took over as the CEO at IBM in April 2020 where he had started his career in 1990. He’s has been called the “principal architect of IBM's largest acquisition of $34 billion of Red Hat”.

Raghu Raghuraman

Raghu Raghuraman became the 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 has also helmed VMWare's software-defined data centre as the executive VP and GM.

Nikesh Arora

Nikesh Arora is the CEO of Palo Alto Networks and has been in that role since 2018. Before that Arora worked in companies like Google and SoftBank. Arora has a Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Banaras Hindu University. He also has an MBA from Northeastern University and an MSC from Boston College.

Sanjay Mehrotra

Sanjay Mehrotra is currently the 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 (WD).

Anjali Sud

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

George Kurian is the CEO and President of NetApp which is a data storage company. He took over that role in 2015. Kurian studied engineering from IIT Madras but he dropped out and took up the same course in Princeton University. Kurian also has an MBA from Stanford.

Revathi Advaithi

Revathi Advaithi is the CEO of Flex. She also serves as 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 has 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.

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