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Parag Agrawal, who was named CEO of Twitter this week, has joined at least a dozen high-profile Indian-born tech companies in Silicon Valley. How can the Indians dominate? Picture/Document
A number of companies currently inhabiting Silicon Valley include Adobe Systems, Apple Computer, Cisco Systems, eBay, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo!.
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People of Indian descent make up only about 1% of the US population and 6% of the Silicon Valley workforce. But somehow they dominate the ranks of high-tech companies.
For example, at Microsoft there is Satya Nadella, then Alphabet has Sundar Pichai. And then it doesn’t stop there, the bosses of IBM, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, VMWare and even Vimeo are all of Indian origin.
“No other country in the world trains so many citizens in the manner of a gladiator as India,” said R Gopalakrishnan, former executive director of Tata Sons.
“From birth certificates to death certificates, from school admissions to job hunting, from poor infrastructure to insufficient capacity. Everything is growing in India, which makes Indians natural managers,” said he added, quoting famous Indian business strategist CKK Prahalad.
Competition and chaos, in other words, make them (Indians) adaptable to solve problems. He continued, adding to the fact that they often prioritize professional interests over personal interests in American work culture.
“It’s a characteristic of top leaders all over the world,” Gopalakrishnan said.
The Indian-born Silicon Valley CEO is also part of a minority group of four million people who are among the wealthiest and most educated people in the United States.
