Five Indian-origin women have made it to the list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women compiled by Forbes. The list of 100 ranks US's most successful women entrepreneurs and executives.
Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO of Arista Networks--a computer networking firm, is the highest ranked among the Indians. Ranked at 16, she is one of America's wealthiest female executives. Ullal was born in London and raised in India.
Ullal is followed by Syntel co-founder Neerja Sethi at No 26. The 66-year-old emulated the TCS model to start the IT consulting and outsourcing firm with her husband Bharat Desai in 1980 in their apartment in Troy, Michigan.
Neha Narkhede, cofounder and former chief technology officer of cloud company Confluent, is the next Indian-American on the list. As a LinkedIn software engineer, she helped develop the open source messaging system Apache Kafka to handle the networking site's huge influx of data. Narkhede, who grew up in Pune, India, studied Computer Science at Georgia Tech and today advises numerous technology startups. She is ranked 29 on the list.
Next comes Reshma Shetty, ranked at 39. Shetty cofounded Gingko Bioworks, a synthetic biotechnology company, in 2009 with four others, including her husband Barry Canton. Ginkgo, named after a dinosaur-era tree, uses data analytics and robotics to speed up the process of discovering and making new organisms.
Former chair and CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi is placed at the 91st rank. Nooyi grew up in India and studied MBA at Yale. She joined the board of Amazon in 2019 post her retirement from Pepsico after 24 years.
Seventy-four-year-old Diane Hendricks, who chairs ABC Supply, one of the largest wholesale distributors of roofing, siding and windows in America, tops the list. The list also includes the likes of Oprah Winfrey (rank 12), Sheryl Sandberg (rank 15), Rihanna (rank 16), and Serena Williams (rank 98).
