On Monday (November 30), Twitter founder Jack Dorsey stepped down as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the micro-blogging platform, making way for Parag Agarwal, an IIT Bombay alumnus. Twitter was co-founded by Jack Dorsey with Ev Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass in 2006. He served as the CEO of the platform until 2008 before returning as CEO for the second time in 2015.
not sure anyone has heard but,
— jack⚡️ (@jack) November 29, 2021
I resigned from Twitter pic.twitter.com/G5tUkSSxkl
This has kicked off discussions on social media about Indians occupying the post of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of major companies including Microsoft, Twitter, Adobe, Google and so on. A few social media users claimed that although many such tech companies are now headed by Indians, they were not founded by any one of Indian origin.
There were some discussions saying that Indians can become only CEOs, and not founders of successful businesses. However, the data says that Indians have been quite successful in the USA as founders of tech companies too.
According to a report [pdf] published by Kauffman Foundation in 2017, about 33% of immigrant-founded companies in the United States are founded by immigrants from India. Between 1995 to 2005, Indians founded 25.8% of immigrant-founded companies. As per the graph shown below, the Indian community was at the helm of 33.2% immigrant-founded engineering/tech companies between 2006 and 2012.
“Indians have founded more such companies than immigrants born in the next top seven immigrant founder sending countries combined. While the mix of immigrants varies by state, Indians tend to dominate the immigrant-founding groups of the top six states (California, Massachusetts, Texas, Florida, New York, and New Jersey) with the greatest representation of immigrant founders,” it read.
“Indian founders continued to favour California and New Jersey as locations to start businesses, founding 35% of their companies in these two states alone…The percentage of Indian founders in California has increased from 20% to 26% since 2005. Indians are the dominant founders of immigrant companies in all seven industries: biosciences (35%), computers/communications (28%), innovation/manufacturing-related services (29%), semiconductors (32%), software (33%), environmental (39%), and defense/aerospace(23%),” the report emphasised.
YourStory reported that 25 US companies, which were founded by Indian immigrants, were the subject of incredible acquisitions. For instance, Sandisk, founded by Sanjay Mehrotra, was acquired in October 2015 by Western Digital at $19 billion. “Since 2012, more than 25 Indian-founded companies have seen M&As worth more than $500 million,” it stated.
India has the third-largest start-up Unicorn ecosystem
Earlier on September 2 this year, Hurun India accorded India the third position in the list of largest Unicorn systems in the world. As per the Hurun India Future Unicorn List 2021, India has 51 Unicorns, 32 Gazelles and 54 Cheetahs. The Unicorns are those start-ups, which are founded after the year 2000 and have a valuation of US$1bn. Gazelles are the start-ups expected to reach Unicorn status in 2 years while Cheetahs are expected to reach Unicorn status in 4 years.
According to Times Now, Hurun India report said, “Although the Indian start-up ecosystem is growing, some of the start-ups, who reach a certain scale migrate from India, in search for better regulatory incentives and risk capital availability. For instance, some of the best Enterprise SaaS companies are born in India but “flipped” to the USA. This is a lost opportunity for India and it is important that these start-ups are incentivized to stay back in the country.”
