Written By Allison Hazeem
Indian American women are some of the strongest women in America. I hate to be basis since I am one. But I love my culture & the many amazing women that come from it. 5 Indian American women on Forbes 2021 List of America's Richest Self-made women will be discussed throughout this blog & I hope you enjoy it!
Jayshree Ullal, is the President and CEO of cloud networking firm Arista Networks. Jayshree’s net worth soared from $1.3 billion in 2020 to $1.7 billion in 2021. One of the five Indian-origin women on Forbes’ 2021 list of America’s richest self-made women, Jayshree Ullal drove Arista Networks’ revenues from $1.1 billion in 2016 to $2.2 billion in 2018, with her leadership. She featured among Barron’s World’s Best CEOs in 2018 and Fortune’s Top 20 Business Persons in 2019.
The winner of the ‘Ernst and Young US Entrepreneur of the Year’ award in 2015, Jayshree was born in London and raised in New Delhi. She graduated in electrical engineering from San Francisco State University and studied masters in engineering management at Santa Clara University. Forbes Magazine previously named her ‘one of the top five most influential people in the networking industry.’
Neerja Sethi with a net worth of $1 billion, is the second richest Indian American business woman based in Florida. She was Director and co-founder of Syntel Inc., a prestigious IT consulting and outsourcing company. Her journey from Troy, Michigan where she co-founded Syntel at her residence with an initial investment of $2000 in 1980, to Forbes’ 2021 list of America’s richest self-made women makes an incredible success story. Acquired by a French IT firm for $3.4 billion in 2018, Syntel currently employs about 23,000 people around the world, 80% of which is in India.
Neha Narkhede from Maharashtra is a self-made tech entrepreneur and leading startup advisor with a net worth of $925 million. One of America’s richest business women on Forbes’ 2021 list, Neha Narkhede is one of the few who quit high-paying jobs to venture out as entrepreneurs. In 2014, she quit her LinkedIn career as the Lead of Streams Infrastructure to co-found Confluent as a streaming data technology startup in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2017, she created Apache Kafka to help conglomerates like Uber, Netflix, and Goldman Sachs to process huge influx of data.
Neha Narkhede is a technology executive, engineer and leader. She is currently working as the CTO of Dropbox and leader of the OCP project at The Linux Foundation. Named one of the world’s top 50 Women in Tech by Forbes, Neha believes that being a little deaf to criticism and skepticism is a survival strategy in any male-dominated field. When she was growing up, her father laid the foundation of her future. Once she told CNBC, “When I was growing up, he selected books from different walks of life and told me stories of women who were trailblazers in very male-dominated fields.
As a co-founder of Gingko Bioworks, Dr. Reshma Shetty is a successful bioengineer and inventor in the Greater Boston Area. As an avid advocate of women in science, she started her journey as a graduate research assistant from MIT and went on to cofound Gingko Bioworks along with scientists from MIT under the supervision of Tom Knight, former senior research scientist at the MIT School of Engineering. Gingko Bioworks specializes in using genetic engineering to produce bacteria with industrial applications, while also making new organisms. The company went public in 2019 at a value of $4.2 billion.
Indra Nooyi made history when she became the first ever woman to run a Fortune 500 company. With a net worth of $290 million, she features on Time Magazine and Forbes’ lists of the world’s most powerful women in business several times. A native of India, she has been a hard-working professional since the days when she worked the graveyard shift as a dorm receptionist to make a living. “When you have a competence that nobody else has, you become more valuable” is her message to every budding professional. In 2021, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in New York. Her treasure trove of achievements includes Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters and Honorary Doctorate of Law from several prestigious US universities
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