The list of Indian-origin CEOs at US tech companies continues to grow bigger.
Paddy Srinivasan has been appointed as the new CEO of cloud services provider DigitalOcean. Srinivasan replaces outgoing CEO Yancey Spruill who had led DigitalOcean since 2019, and had taken the company public in 2021. DigitalOcean provides cloud services to small and large businesses, and is currently worth over $3 billion.
“We are thrilled to welcome Paddy to DigitalOcean,” said Warren Adelman, Executive Chairman of DigitalOcean’s Board of Directors. “Paddy’s entire career has centered on providing simple, powerful, and scalable technology solutions. His extensive product-led growth experience and proven technical leadership will enable us to execute our strategic initiatives and propel DigitalOcean to expand its large and loyal customer base while increasing the value we provide those customers,” he added.
Srinivasan has trod a now-familiar path towards becoming the CEO of a global tech company. He had graduated with a degree in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from BITS Pilani. He had had then moved to the US, and completed an MBA from Southern Methodist University. After graduating, he’d worked with Microsoft, ending up becoming a Director by 2006. He’d then worked with Orcale for 3 years, and had then been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, founding a company named Opstra which provided cloud management services. Opstra was acquired by Microsoft in 2012, and Srinivasan then went on to work for remote services provider LogMeIn. Srinivanan had then briefly worked with Amazon for a year, before being appointed the CEO of IT communication software company GoTo, which had $1 billion in revenue. He’s now been appointed the CEO of DigitalOcean.
Srinivasan’s appointment as DigitalOcean’s CEO adds him to the list of Indians who head global tech companies. Right now, Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google, Satya Nadella is the CEO of Microsoft, Shantanu Narayen is the CEO of Adobe and Arvind Krishna is the CEO of IBM. Like Paddy Srinivasan, they’d all completed their undergraduate degrees in India, before moving to the US for higher studies. While this pipeline has already reaped rich dividends to the US tech industry, with India slowly coming into its own as an economic power, it’s expected that future generations of its engineering graduates will help build and develop companies right in their own backyards.