The list of Indian-origin CEOs at US tech companies continues to grow bigger.
IIT Madras graduate Sridhar Ramaswamy has been appointed the CEO of US-based cloud company Snowflake. He replaces Snowflake’s current CEO Frank Slootman who has retired, but will continue to remain on the board. Publicly-listed Snowflake has nearly 6,000 employees, and had revenue of $2.3 billion last year.
“I am honoured to have been chosen to lead the company into this next chapter of growth,” Ramaswamy said on his appointment. “We have an enormous opportunity ahead to help all customers leverage AI to deliver massive business value. My focus will be on accelerating our ability to bring innovation to our customers and partners,” he added.
Ramaswamy has trod a now-familiar path towards becoming the CEO of a global tech company. He had graduated with a BTech in Computer Science from IIT Madras in 1989, and had then moved to the US for higher studies. He had completed his PhD in Computer Science from Brown University in 1994. He had then worked with tech companies including Telcordia Technologies, Bell Labs and E.piphany, before joining Google in 2003. At Google he rose through the ranks, first joining as a Software Engineer, and was promoted to Engineering Director, VP Engineering, SVP Engineering and SVP of Ads and Commerce over the next 15 years. In 2019, he quit Google to launch is own search engine named Neeva, which aimed to be a privacy-focused alternative to Google’s search engine. Neeva didn’t find much traction, but was acquired by Snowflake. Ramaswamy thus ended up joining Snowflake, and has now been appointed its CEO.
Sridhar Ramaswamy’s appointment as Snowflake’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 Sridhar Ramaswamy, 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.