Global Trends

Why India Runs Silicon Valley

Eric Garcetti, the US Ambassador to India, said it in a New Delhi interview in 2024: “The old joke was you could not become a CEO in the US if you are Indian. Now the joke is you cannot become a CEO in America if you are not Indian.”

The numbers back him up. Indian CEOs in Silicon Valley and across Fortune 500 companies now number 11 on the 2025 list, with a combined market cap exceeding $6.5 trillion. Satya Nadella runs Microsoft. Sundar Pichai runs Alphabet. Arvind Krishna runs IBM. Shantanu Narayen runs Adobe. Nikesh Arora runs Palo Alto Networks. Jayshree Ullal runs Arista Networks. Leena Nair runs Chanel. Ajay Banga runs the World Bank. The list covers the commanding heights of global tech, finance, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods.

India has 1.4 billion people, roughly 18% of the world’s population. What it has built is not proportional representation. It is something closer to a structural lock on a specific kind of global leadership, built over sixty years through deliberate policy, engineered scarcity, and competitive pressure that begins in primary school.

It Started With Nehru and a Problem

When India gained independence in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru faced a country with almost no industrial or technological base. The British had not been interested in building one. Nehru was. He believed India could not develop without engineers and scientists produced at scale by institutions capable of competing with the best in the world.

The first Indian Institute of Technology opened in Kharagpur in 1951. Four more followed: Bombay in 1958, Kanpur and Madras in 1959, Delhi in 1961. They were not built to be local colleges. Faculty were recruited internationally. The curriculum was modelled on MIT. Funding came partly from the United States and the Soviet Union, both of which saw geopolitical value in helping India build technical capacity during the Cold War.

From their earliest years, the IITs produced graduates more prepared for global technical work than almost any other institution in the developing world. That was the point.

The Hardest Entrance Exam on Earth

Getting into an IIT requires passing the Joint Entrance Examination Advanced. Roughly 150,000 students sit it each year. Approximately 16,000 places are available across all 23 IIT campuses. The acceptance rate for the original top five IITs runs at about 1 in 50. Harvard’s is around 3.5%.

The preparation has spawned its own city. Kota, in Rajasthan, has become almost entirely dedicated to coaching students for the JEE. Tens of thousands of teenagers leave their families every year to spend two years there studying for a single exam. The coaching industry generates billions of rupees annually and has produced its own documentaries and controversies.

By the time an IIT graduate arrives at an American company or postgraduate programme, they have already cleared a selection process more rigorous than anything most US universities apply. They have been competing since early adolescence against a national pool of technically oriented peers. The people who cannot handle that pressure do not make it through, which means the ones who do have already demonstrated something about themselves before they board a plane.

The H-1B Pipeline

The IITs were the factory. The H-1B visa was the export route.

The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 removed immigration restrictions based on national origin that had kept Indian immigration to the United States negligible. The H-1B programme was created in its current form in 1990, designed specifically to let American companies hire workers with technical skills the domestic labour market could not supply at sufficient volume.

India’s English-language technical education made it the obvious source. In fiscal year 2024, Indian nationals received 283,397 H-1B visas, approximately 71% of all approvals. No other country is close. China has similar numbers of technically educated graduates but significantly lower H-1B representation, largely because of the language difference. An IIT graduate arrives in the United States having spent their entire academic career reading, writing, and arguing in English. The professional friction of an American workplace is lower for them than for peers from countries where English is studied rather than used.

The standard pathway became a pattern repeated hundreds of thousands of times. IIT or another Indian engineering college. A US master’s at Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, or Illinois. An H-1B work visa. A green card application that could take fifteen to twenty years to clear. Citizenship.

Sundar Pichai’s route is the template. Born in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, two-room apartment, no telephone until age 12. IIT Kharagpur. Stanford scholarship in 1993. McKinsey. Google in 2004. CEO in 2015.

Satya Nadella: Hyderabad, Manipal Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, University of Chicago, Microsoft in 1992, CEO in 2014.

Arvind Krishna: IIT Kanpur, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign PhD, IBM Research, CEO in 2020.

Parag Agrawal, who briefly ran Twitter before Elon Musk acquired it: IIT Bombay, gold medal at the 2001 International Physics Olympiad, Stanford PhD, Twitter CEO at 37 in 2021.

The credentials vary. The shape of the journey does not.

Why Not China? Why Not Germany?

By the 1990s, roughly one-third of immigrant-founded Silicon Valley startups were Indian-founded. The concentration of Indian CEOs in Silicon Valley today traces directly back to that early dominance in the startup ecosystem.

The difference is mostly language. English is the medium of instruction in Indian higher education in a way it simply is not in China, Germany, Japan, or South Korea. The professional and social friction of operating in an American workplace is lower for someone whose entire academic career happened in English than for peers who are equally talented technically but less fluent in the cultural register of American business.

There is also the network effect that compounds over decades. American universities began recruiting Indian talent in the early Cold War period. American companies set up R&D operations in India in the 1980s. By the time the 1990s tech boom arrived, established communities of Indian engineers were already in place in Silicon Valley. Indian engineers hire from networks they know, which skews toward other Indians, which produces more senior Indian professionals, who build more networks. The concentration feeds itself.

The Network That Runs Through Multiple Floors

One underexamined part of the Indian CEOs in Silicon Valley story is how the IIT alumni network operates not just at the CEO level but throughout the organisations those CEOs run.

At some Silicon Valley companies, the IITian presence runs through founders, mentors, board members, and venture capitalists simultaneously. A resume with an IIT degree opens doors that other credentials cannot, because the person reading it understands exactly what surviving the JEE and four years at an IIT required. It is a shared reference point that signals something specific about the candidate.

In 2005, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution honouring IIT graduates for their contribution to American innovation. It was one of the rare times Congress formally recognised the alumni body of a foreign university, which reflects how visible the network had already become by that point.

Sundar Pichai, speaking at the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit: “I remember jumping onto a crowded train in Chennai and travelling for 24 hours to attend my school. That opportunity changed the course of my life.” A teenager in 1989 India, 24 hours on a crowded train, to reach a university that would eventually result in him running the most valuable advertising business in human history.

What the CEOs Actually Did With It

Satya Nadella took over Microsoft in 2014 when the company was widely considered to have lost its way after the Steve Ballmer years. Under Nadella it became the first company to sustain a valuation above $3 trillion. He had championed the Azure cloud business before becoming CEO. That bet became the engine of the entire transformation.

Sundar Pichai led Alphabet to $88.25 billion in revenue in a single quarter in Q3 2024. Nikesh Arora took Palo Alto Networks past $8 billion in annual revenue. Shantanu Narayen has run Adobe since 2007, overseeing its full shift from boxed software to cloud subscriptions, one of the cleaner enterprise transformations of the past two decades.

Piyush Gupta, CEO of DBS Bank, described it at a 2022 CNBC roundtable: hunger, adaptability, tenacity. The hunger piece is not rhetorical. The people who survived the JEE, who left home at sixteen for Kota, who spent years on H-1B visas unable to change employers without risking their immigration status, did not arrive at the top of American companies having had things made easy for them at any stage.

Where the Pipeline Runs Out

The story of Indian CEOs in Silicon Valley has real limits worth naming.

The pipeline produces technical and operational leaders in volume. It has not produced comparable concentration of Indian-origin figures in American media, entertainment, or politics. The same pathway that filters for technical excellence and corporate ambition does not produce the same outcome in fields where cultural fluency with American mass audiences matters more than engineering credentials.

The H-1B system that made all of this possible is also, for most of the people using it, a difficult experience. Workers on H-1B visas cannot change employers freely without jeopardising their immigration status. The backlog for Indian nationals applying for employment-based green cards has, at points, stretched beyond a century of waiting time at current application volumes. The same pipeline that produced these CEOs kept hundreds of thousands of skilled workers in career and geographic limbo for years, sometimes decades.

And for every Sundar Pichai, there are thousands of IIT graduates in mid-level roles at American companies whose careers are shaped as much by the structural constraints of the visa system as by their own capabilities.

The 11 Fortune 500 CEOs are the visible outcome of a system set in motion in Kharagpur in 1951, when a newly independent country with almost no industrial base decided that the most important thing it could build was a place where its most capable people could become capable of competing with anyone on earth.

It worked.