Indians Abroad

A snapshot of Indians at the helm of leading Global businesses

Vinod Khosla
The Co-founder of Sun Microsystems

Vinod Khosla (born January 28, 1955 in Pune, India) is an Indian-American venture capitalist. He is an influential personality in Silicon Valley. He was one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems and became a general partner of the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers in 1986

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Vinod Dahm
Creator of Pentium Chip

Vinod Dham born in 1950, is a venture capitalist, and is often referred to as the father of the Intel Pentium processor.

Vinod was born in the city of Pune, India. He completed his undergraduate education in Electrical Engineering from the Delhi College of Engineering. In 1971, after graduation, he joined a Delhi-based semiconductor company called Continental Devices. In 1975, he left this job and joined University of Cincinnati to pursue a masters degree in Electrical Engineering, where he specialized in Solid State Science. After completing his masters degree in 1977, he joined NCR Corporation at Dayton, Ohio. He then joined Intel, and started working on the Pentium chip. He rose to the position of vice-president of Intel. He left Intel in 1995, and joined a number of startups including NexGen, which was acquired by AMD, and then went on to Silicon Spice. He is also the co-founding partner of New Path Ventures which has funded Companies like Nevis Networks.
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Arun Sarin
Chief Executive officer of Vodafone

Arun Sarin (born October 21, 1954, in Pachmarhi, Madhya Pradesh, India) is the CEO of the world's biggest mobile phone company (by revenue), Britain's Vodafone Group plc. He is originally from India, has United States citizenship, and is presently based in the United Kingdom.

Sarin graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur with a B.Tech degree in Engineering in 1975. In 1978 he gained a MS in Engineering and a MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to this he did his schooling from Military School Bangalore, Bangalore. He excelled in studies, sports and co curricular activities. He was known for his sharp intelligence and good sporting skills especially in hockey and boxing in school. He started his career as a management consultant before moving, in 1984, to Pacific Telesis Group in San Francisco. He was a director of AirTouch from July 1995 and was President and Chief Operating Officer from February 1997 to June 1999. He was then Vodafone's Chief Executive Officer for the United States and Asia Pacific region until 15 April 2000, when Vodafone's U.S. interests were merged into Verizon Wireless. He subsequently became chief executive of InfoSpace from 2000 to 2001, and of Accel-KKR Telecom based in San Francisco from 2001 to 2003, while serving as a non-executive director of Vodafone. He rejoined Vodafone as Chief Executive Designate on 1 April 2003 and was appointed on a permanent basis after the Company's annual general meeting on 30 July 2003.
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Sabeer Bhatia
Founder and creator of Hotmail

Sabeer was born in Chandigarh, India in 1968. His father, Baldev Bhatia, started as an officer in the Indian Army and later joined the Indian Ministry of Defence, while his mother, Daman Bhatia, was a senior official at the Central Bank of India Bhatia was schooled at the St. Joseph's Boys' High School in Bangalore. He started his undergraduate education at the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, BITS, Pilani and transferred to Caltech after two years at BITS. After graduating from Caltech, Sabeer went to Stanford to pursue his MS in Electrical Engineering. At Stanford, he worked on Ultra Low Power VLSI Design.

At Stanford, he was inspired by entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Scott McNealy eventually deciding to become one himself. Instead of pursuing a PhD after his Masters, he decided to join Apple.

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Rajat Gupta
Managing Director of McKinsey & Co.

Rajat Kumar Gupta born in Calcutta, India on December 2, 1948.
He obviously is a shining example of how talent and hard work can bring up an orphaned boy from a poor family who couldn't continue studies without scholarship, to IIT and then Harvard Business School and then to the position of Managing Director at the very prestigious McKinsey and Company.

Rajat Kumar Gupta is the former managing director of McKinsey & Company worldwide. He joined the firm's New York office in 1973, assumed leadership of its Scandinavian offices in 1981, and joined the Chicago office in 1987. He assumed the role of office manager there in 1989, was elected managing director of the firm in 1994 and re-elected twice, once in 1997 and again in 2000.

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Indra Nooyi
Chairman and CEO of Pepsi Cola

Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi born on October 28, 1955 in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India is the chairman and chief executive officer of PepsiCo, the world's fourth-largest food and beverage company. On August 14, 2006, she was named the next to succeed Steve Reinemund as chief executive officer of the company. Reinemund, 58, retired on October 1, 2006. According to Forbes magazine's 2006 poll, Ms. Nooyi is the fourth most powerful woman in the world. She has been named the #1 Most Powerful Woman in Business in 2006 by Fortune magazine.

She received a bachelor's degree from Madras Christian College in 1974, and immediately entered the PGDBA (Post-Graduate Diploma in Business Administration; MBA equivalent) program at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. After graduating from IIM-C in 1976, she worked in India for several years (including a stretch at Madurai Coates). She was admitted to Yale School of Management in 1978 for a master's degree in Management, which essentially replicated her IIM-C certification. Following her master's degree from Yale in 1980, Nooyi started at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), from where she moved on to strategy positions at Motorola and ABB.
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Rajiv Gupta
GM of Hewlett Packard

Rajiv Gupta is a software pioneer in web services. He was co-inventor and general manager of Hewlett Packard's E-speak project in 1999, and was one of the developers of the IA-64 architecture. He founded Confluent Software (now owned by Oracle Corporation), developing what became an industry-leading CoreSV product. He also founded Securent and supports Bodhtree (based in Hyderabad) as a technology adviser.

Rajiv studied at the IIT Kharagpur, India, for his bachelor's degree. Thereafter Rajeev got one of the prestigious places at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). At the Caltech, Rajiv earned his PhD, in a little less than a year, studying compilers and the methods to optimize them. Rajiv is an academic eccentric; he has a knack of working to get the desired, single minded.

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Victor Menezes
Chief Executive of CitiBank

Victor J. Menezes (May 14, 1949 - ) is an engineer and banker, who acts as a top official in international financial organizations. He is originally from India and received his degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1970. He received a Master's degree in Management (M.B.A.) from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1972. In the same year, he joined Citicorp in Corporate Banking. Later, he was posted in "practically every continent" -- as one bio-sketch put it. Displaying exemplary banking skills throughout, he rose to the post of Chief Financial Officer in 1995.

Menezes is believed to have played a key role in crafting a $3 billion write-off in Latin American debt in 1987. This helped open the way for Latin American countries to access capital markets while clearing "an ugly mess from the bank's books".
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Rana Talwar
Chief Executives of Standard Chartered Bank

Gurvinder Singh Rana Talwar, former group chief executive officer of Standard Chartered Plc, is hoping to play a major role in the consolidation that he anticipates in the Indian banking sector by acquiring management control and merging troubled banks.

RANA TALWAR, 58; Chairman, Sabre Capital Worldwide Inc., a private equity and management firm focused on investing in financial institutions in emerging markets with an emphasis on Asia, since December 2002, Tortola, British Virgin Islands; Group Chief Executive, Standard Chartered PLC, a global bank, from June 1997 to December 2001, London.
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Arun Netravali
President of AT & T-Bell Labs

Arun N. Netravali (b. May 26, 1946 in Bombay) is an Indian-American engineer and businessman who is a pioneer of digital technology including HDTV. He conducted seminal research in digital compression, signal processing and other fields, including important collaborative work with Thomas S. Huang. Netravali has been President of Bell Laboratories and Chief Scientist for Lucent Technologies.

He received his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from Rice University in Houston, Texas. He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, and Rutgers University. He has authored more than 170 technical papers and co-authored three books: Digital Picture Representation and Compression, Visual Communications Systems, and Digital Video: An Introduction to MPEG-2. He holds more than 70 patents relating to computer networks, human interfaces to machines, picture processing, and digital television. He interacted with the students of his alma mater, IIT Bombay during Techfest 2007

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Amar Bose
Founder of Bose Audio

Amar Gopal Bose (born November 2, 1929) is the chairman and founder of Bose Corporation. A Bengali Indian American electrical engineer, he was listed on the 2006 Forbes 400 with a net worth of $1.5 billion.

Amar Bose first displayed his entrepreneurial skills and his interest in technology at age thirteen, when, during the World War-II years, he enlisted school friends as co-workers in a small home business repairing model trains and home radios, to supplement his family's income.

Bose was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; his father, Noni Gopal Bose, was an Indian freedom revolutionary from Bengal who having been imprisoned for his political activities, fled (Calcutta) Kolkata in the 1920s in order to avoid further prosecution by the British colonial police.

Amar Bose attended Abington Senior High School and later obtained a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His PhD thesis was a highly mathematical treatise on non-linear systems.

Not yet wealthy, Bose entered MIT as a work-study student with a great deal of practical experience in electronics. After six years, he graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering in the early 1950s. Bose spent a year in Eindhoven, Netherlands, in the research labs at NV Philips Electronics and a year in New Delhi, India, as a Fulbright student.
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Kanwal Rekhi
Former CTO of Novell Networks

Kanwal Rekhi (born 1945) is an Indian-American engineer, businessman and millionaire philanthropist.

Kanwal was born in Rawalpindi (then in British India, now in Pakistan). After the partition of India, his family settled in Kanpur, India. In 1967 Rekhi graduated as an electrical engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, India and in 1969 he received a Master of Science degree from Michigan Technological University. Kanwal has been a major donor to Michigan Tech, including a gift of $5 million for new computer science facilities. He worked as an engineer, systems analyst, and manager for many years before floating his first company, Excelan in 1982. Excelan was a manufacturer of smart ethernet cards, and was also responsible for the commercial growth of the internet protocol TCP/IP. The company merged with, and was acquired by Novell in 1989 and Kanwal was given a seat on the board.

Kanwal was named Entrepreneur of the Year in 1987 by the Arthur-Young/Venture magazine. He was named to the Board of Advisors to the President of Michigan Tech and in 1997 was honoured with a doctorate in Business and Engineering. Kanwal is also involved in increasing the visibility of premier educational institutions in India. He gave US $3 million to IIT Bombay to help set up a new School of Information Technology, named KReSIT (Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology), which opened in 1999.

He is also Chairman of the Centre for Civil Society, a think tank in India.

More Profiles are Yet to Come!!!

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