Corporate America’s pipeline of Indian techies may be drying up

Parag Agrawal, 37, holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay.

Parag Agrawal’s ascension to the top job at social media’s most volatile corporation Twitter Inc. continues the well-established trend of Indian-born CEOs being picked to head major US corporations. A dozen Indians have over the last couple of decades occupied the corner office at well-known US companies including Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, Mastercard, Adobe, Nokia, Mckinsey, and Citibank.

But Corporate America’s growing love for Indians at the top may soon be facing a major challenge from the country of their birth.

The rich pipeline that’s been regularly turning out talented leaders isn’t running dry. Far from it. It is just that there are many more avenues for these Indians to choose from.

Sundar Pichhai, Satya Nadella, Shantanu Narayen, and Arvind Krishna are all fallouts of a dismal chapter in India’s economy, a system that was built to subdue creativity, and talent. They sought to move abroad for further education, and then careers, since the India of the time didn’t give them enough chances to realise their ambitions.

Nadella, for instance, moved to the US from India in 1988 for his computer science degree after his bachelor's in electrical engineering. The senior-most among them, IBM’s Krishna did his electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 1985, which was also around the time that Narayen who heads Adobe left for the US.

The late 1970s and 1980s was the era of government-imposed salary caps when even private companies needed regulatory approval to decide the compensation packages for their executives. Not surprisingly, many bright young Indians left for overseas shores, giving rise to the derisive term ‘brain drain’.

Even before them many Indians who went abroad after an education at the IITs, ended up doing well. Ajit Jain, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway’s insurance business, who left in 1972 after his graduation from IIT Kharagpur, and Rakesh Gangwal who left in 1975 after graduating from IIT Kanpur, are perfect examples. Still, despite their early success, recognition in the US was much more difficult at that time. US corporations, weighed down by their own prejudices, and without legal provisions mandating diversity, could barely see beyond the White Caucasian male to lead them. Till the early 1990s, the number of non-white-male CEOs heading Fortune 500 corporations could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

That changed at the turn of the century. Not just Indians, but Asian Americans in general as well as other minority groups such as African Americans and Latinos started finding higher representation at the high tables of corporate America.

Paradoxically this coincided with India’s own rise as an economic power. In this new India, there are no constraints on how much a top executive can earn, and given purchasing power parity many Indian CEOs today earn as much as their counterparts around the world. A career path to the top, therefore, need not necessarily be through a US corporation.

A bigger threat for US recruiters scouting for the next CEO from among Indians, is the burgeoning startup ecosystem in India which is rapidly minting dollar millionaires and billionaires. Zepto, a six-month-old grocery delivery startup, recently raised $60 million at a valuation of $225 million. Significantly, both its two founders Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra are drop outs from Stanford University, the alma mater of Agrawal.

Indeed, Binny Bansal, Sachin Bansal, Deepinder Goyal, Bhavish Aggarwal, Ankit Bhati, Pranay Chulet, Nitin Kamath, and Amrit Acharya are among the dozens of young Indians that in an earlier era might have been peddling their skills in large MNCs, preferably in the US. That they stayed on, built entrepreneurial success stories, and in some cases cashed out big time, shows how the world is changing with India becoming a land of opportunity. Many of them, in fact, have left lucrative careers to build businesses at home.

It was the same with the Chinese, and before that with the so-called Asian Tigers when young women and men went for an education to the best universities in the US but eventually came back home to build enterprises or take up jobs that, with their economies growing exponentially, were paying as well as those they had left behind.

In addition, the US itself with its preferential treatment of entrepreneurs gives a glide path even for those looking beyond the corporate routine. Check the plethora of Indians associated with the crypto wave to get a sense of where many of the smart Indians are headed.

US corporations may find the next Parag Agrawal a bit more difficult to mine.