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Femme Fettle: In US, Indian Women
Too Get a Taste of Tech-Tonic
Chidanand Rajghatta
The Indian Express
PALO ALTO (CALIFORNIA), NOV 13: Manisha Nerurkar remembers
the day she was on the road with 27 cents in her pocket and nowhere to go. Her husband had just thrown her out
of the house and she did not have a relative in the United States. But the gutsy Mumbai woman wasn't going to be
beaten.
The ride she hitched to a shelter that cold night was the start of a journey of self-discovery. She went back to
school, worked her way through minimum wage, clawed her way between start-ups, and rode the tech wave in Silicon
Valley like any turbo-charged male. "That was just four years ago,'' grinned the plucky software engineer
from Cisco. "And this week I have just made my first million.''
While one hears any number of success stories in Silicon Valley involving Indian men, an extraordinary new development
is taking place in the high-tech field. Indian women, for long homemakers, child-bearers, trophy wives, and occasional
wage-earners in the US, are suddenly blossoming in a field that was hitherto thought to be a male preserve.
The results are already beginning to show. Cisco's vice-president Jayashree Ullal, Yahoo! Content Editor Srinija
Srinivasan, DigitalLink Chairwoman Vinita Gupta, Smart Modular Co-Founder Lata Krishnan, Rightworks CEO Vani Kola,
former Hewlett Packard GM and current CEO of Tioga Systems Radha Basu are among the achievers who have shown that
when it comes to the tech world, they are in fine fettle too. Says Anu Shukla, CEO of the San Mateo-based Rubric,
an e-marketing company, "Our time has come.''
The biggest success story among Indian women though belongs to Srinija Srinivasan, vice-president and editor-in-chief
of the wildly popular net destination Yahoo! Lesser known than the celebrated duo of Jerry Yang and David Philo
who founded the company, "Ninja,'' as she is nicknamed by her colleagues (because they found it hard to pronounce
Srinija and also because of her felicity with Japanese) is quite likely the first Indian billionairess.
At 29 Born in India, Srinija arrived in US as a three-month-old. Her dad taught mathematics at the University of
Kansas and her mom was a Sanskrit scholar who reinvented herself as a computer programmer. Srinija schooled at
Stanford and in her junior year she went to intern in Japan where she met Yang and Philo, two Taiwanese students
who could not speak a word of Japanese, a tongue Srinija had mastered.
Two years later when the celebrated duo launched Yahoo!, they pulled Ninja out of a job where she was working on
artificial intelligence, essentially trying to teach a computer the fundamentals of human knowledge.
Srinija was to be Yahoo!'s ontologist someone trained in the science of sorting information. But this was in 1994
and the net was just beginning to grow and spout uncontrollably. Trying to organise the web was the nearest thing
to cleaning the Augean stables. But Ninja rolled up her sleeve and got to work, creating the basic structure of
the Yahoo directory in 1995. Last year, her pioneering efforts landed her in Newsweek, which named her among the
50 people who matter most on the Internet.
While Srinija ploughed a single and successful furrow, other Indian women entrepreneurs balanced jobs and children.
Smart Modular's co-founder Lata Krishnan and Rightworks CEO Vani Kola, both mothers of two kids, combined a home
life and professional success. With $3.9 million in salary and stock options, Lata Krishnan last year became the
highest paid female executive in Silicon Valley.
Says Gita Lal, CEO of the Austin-based Daman Consulting
who has powered her 1996 start-up to a $10 million-plus revenue company, "Indian women are prospering because
they find they can do well on their own when they are not inhibited by the gender and race boundaries in large
companies.''
In the immigrant nomenclatura, ABCD stands for American Born Confused Desis, and FOB is Fresh off the Boat. The
success of the Indian women entrepreneurs has provided inspiration to both ABCDs and FOBs. At a desi Silicon Valley
networking event last month, the Sisters Patel were flitting about trying to capture interest and raise capital
for an online venture called Pardeshi.com, an e-commerce portal for the Indian diaspora. "Patels have become
like Smiths and Jones to be identified with the motel business. We wanna move out of that niche,'' says Tejal Patel,
a first generation Indian-American fresh out of school.
Indian women are now chucking up history, philosophy, literature, and plain old home-making to go the tech route
in droves. Indian women entrepreneurs are now burgeoning so rapidly that California now has a Indian Business and
Professional Women's Association that promotes education, leadership, and self-development of Indian women through
seminars and workshops. In New Jersey, a tech training school actually sends out flyers to newly-wed Indians in
the neighbourhood encouraging the women to enrol in schools teaching new tech skills.
In fact, the Indian tech magazine SiliconIndia itself is published by Mona Sharma, a East Coast entrepreneur who
is herself moving to the Valley to parlay the magazine into an e-commerce venture and go the dot-com route. The
idea of women making it big in the tech world is so routine among Indians that a little more than a year after
marrying Chini Krishnan, the boyish chairman of Valicert, an internet security firm, his wife Rama Sundararajan
is already talking of heading her own start-up. "Of course, I want to be up there too. And there are enough
inspirational stories already,'' says the Madurai woman, networking furiously at a desi tech gathering. If the
current trend and evidence is anything to go by, no one would bet against it.
(One name in this story has been changed at the request
of the interviewee)
Copyright 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
