Indian-origin entrepreneurs turn around fortune of hottest US startups

This photo illustration shows the logo of trading application Robinhood on a mobile phone in Arlington, Virginia on January 28, 2021. (PC-AFP)

In the Silicon Valley, two startups founded by Indian-origin entrepreneurs – financial trading application Robinhood and social media application Clubhouse – have become the talk of the town.

Both the startups are led by Indian-origin Stanford alumni Baiju Bhatt and Rohan Seth – the co-founders of Robinhood and Clubhouse, respectively.

While Bhatt led Robinhood to a $11.7 billion valuation, Seth’s Clubhouse made it big in less than a year as it now boasts of members such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.Meet the two 20-year-old Indian-origin AI startup founders who've turned investor darlings

Robinhood introduced concepts like free and fractional trading to disrupt the brokerage fees system and Clubhouse shot to popularity by providing access to free-speech and increasing accessibility to power figures.

A Livemnt report quoted Indian-American technology entrepreneur and academic Vivek Wadhwa as saying: “Indians are part of the cultural fabric of Silicon Valley today, and there is a mild stereotype that an Indian will be successful owing to their legacy with tech in the Valley. In the 80s, Indians did face heavy discrimination, and they were considered ‘outliers’. But the community came together and uplifted each other. In the 1980s, American venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Vinod Khosla, became one of the first Indians to make it big in the Valley.”

He added that though Indians are a part of the ‘Big Boys’ club now, women and African-Americans continue to be discriminated against in the Silicon Valley.