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Romesh Wadhwani’s $9.3 billion deal was just a beginning
After two decades of building companies, Romesh Wadhwani founded Aspect Development and reached a $9.3 billion stock deal. He kept building, with enterprise AI and job creation now at the centre of his work.
Sunny Reddy built a business. Then he returned to where he began.
The VoIP Office founder’s route through Michigan runs from a chemical engineering degree to cloud communications, community fundraising and a seat on Wayne State’s Board of Governors.
Chirag Patel and the business of coming back
He helped build Amneal with his brother, returned to run it, and funded a route between the two colleges that shaped his own education. Chirag Patel’s career keeps finding its way back to the beginning.
Deepak Chopra’s other plan involved tacos
Before he founded OSI Systems, Deepak Chopra considered going into fast food. His return to electronics led to decades of building, buying and learning when to hand over the controls.
Chintu Patel and the family firm that kept getting bigger
A father’s principles, a brother’s business sense, and a start funded with $200,000. Chintu Patel’s working life shows how far a family enterprise can travel without losing its original cast.
For Sunny Singh, the long way became the point
He built Edifecs through a five-year recovery, then took his appetite for patient work to football grounds, village projects, and a Seattle classroom. Gurpreet “Sunny” Singh’s second act begins with a question about what success is for.
Gurbaksh Chahal and the price of a click
At sixteen, Gurbaksh Chahal began selling attention from a bedroom in San Jose. Two advertising exits, a dismissal and criminal convictions later, his latest company is selling a different proposition: evidence that AI can be trusted.
Why Nikesh Arora keeps starting over
From a museum interview with Sergey Brin to a cybersecurity company betting on consolidation, Nikesh Arora has kept choosing unfamiliar work. His career offers a study in what experience teaches you - and what it leaves to learn.
Raj Subramaniam and the art of changing the route
He joined FedEx as an associate marketing analyst in 1991. Three decades later, the chemical engineering graduate inherited Fred Smith’s job - and the task of rethinking how the company connects the world.
Jay Chaudhry
Jay Chaudhry is the founder, chairman and CEO of Zscaler, the cloud security company he started in 2007 to replace corporate firewalls with a zero trust internet exchange. A serial founder of five security companies before Zscaler, he took the company public in 2018 and built it into a multi-billion-dollar pillar of the cybersecurity industry.
Sanjay Poonen
Sanjay Poonen is the CEO and President of Cohesity, the data security and management company that absorbed Veritas' enterprise backup business in late 2024 to become the largest data protection vendor in the world. A Dartmouth-Stanford-Harvard alumnus who arrived in Boston at 18 with fifty dollars, he previously helped double revenues at both SAP (from ~$10B to ~$20B) and VMware (from ~$6B to ~$12B), where as COO he architected the landmark VMware-AWS partnership and the AirWatch acquisition.
Tarang Amin
Tarang Amin is the Chairman and CEO of e.l.f. Beauty, the affordable cosmetics company he took public in 2016 and grew from a $135 million equity story into a multi-brand portfolio anchored by e.l.f. Cosmetics, e.l.f. SKIN, Naturium, Well People, Keys Soulcare, and - as of May 2025 - Hailey Bieber's rhode in a $1 billion deal.
Dheeraj Pandey
Dheeraj Pandey is the co-founder and CEO of DevRev, an AI-native CRM and support platform valued at $1.15 billion. A serial unicorn builder, he previously co-founded Nutanix in 2009 and led it as CEO through its 2016 Nasdaq IPO, scaling it to an $18+ billion enterprise. Born in Patna, Bihar, India, he arrived in the US in 1997 with $900 borrowed from education trusts, earned his MS at UT Austin, and spent over two decades building distributed systems before founding two generational companies. He sits on Adobe's board and has donated over $20 million to humanitarian causes, including a $10 million gift to UT Austin for personalized medicine research.
Sonali Shah
Sonali Shah is the CEO of Cobalt, the leading Pentest as a Service (PtaaS) platform, where she took the helm in August 2024 after serving on its board. A product visionary and operator with 20+ years in cybersecurity, she pioneered the first cybersecurity risk rating platform at Bitsight, helped shepherd Veracode through its $950 million sale to Thoma Bravo, and drove Invicti's $625 million acquisition before stepping up to run Cobalt. Educated at Wharton (MBA) and the London School of Economics (MS Economics), she brings a rare mix of Wall Street discipline and deep security product expertise to a company at the intersection of human-led and AI-powered offensive security.
Surya Midha
Surya Midha is a 22-year-old co-founder and Chairman of Mercor, the AI-powered talent platform valued at $10 billion. A Thiel Fellow, national debate champion, and Georgetown dropout, Midha co-built Mercor from a São Paulo hackathon into a company paying 30,000+ contractors over $1.5 million daily, matching elite human intelligence with AI labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. In 2026, he became one of the youngest people ever to appear on the Forbes World's Billionaires List with a net worth of $2.2 billion.
George Kurian
George Kurian is the Chief Executive Officer of NetApp, the $20B+ enterprise data storage and cloud infrastructure company, where he has led a decade-long transformation from legacy storage vendor to AI-ready data platform. Born in Pampady, Kerala, he arrived at Princeton at 17 with a partial scholarship and a twin brother — Thomas Kurian, now CEO of Google Cloud — making them one of the rarest pairs in tech: identical twins who both run major Fortune 500 companies. Under his tenure since 2015, NetApp has posted record revenues of $6.57B in FY2025 and positioned itself as critical backbone for enterprise AI workloads.
Sanjay Dhawan
Sanjay Dhawan is the CEO of SymphonyAI, a Palo Alto-based vertical AI software company assembled by entrepreneur Romesh Wadhwani. He spent thirty years moving between operator and founder seats - co-founding Inkra Networks, running Symphony Teleca through its Harman acquisition, leading Cerence from a $500M Nuance spinout to a >$5B market cap, and now scaling SymphonyAI across retail, financial crime, manufacturing, media, and IT operations. He is also Chairperson of Pioneer Corporation and a Senior Advisor at EQT.
Anirudh Joshi
Anirudh Joshi is the co-founder and CEO of Valar Labs, a Palo Alto-based AI oncology company building tools that let doctors predict whether a specific cancer treatment will work before a patient wastes months on the wrong one. A biomedical engineer trained at Georgia Tech and Stanford, he previously built AI at Microsoft, PathAI, and Curai before co-founding Valar in 2021 with teammates from Stanford's AI in Medicine group. Valar raised $26M total, landing a $22M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz and DCVC in 2024, and its flagship test Vesta — predicting BCG therapy response in bladder cancer — is now live at 20 U.S. hospitals. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare 2025.
Pavan Cheruvu
Dr. Pavan K. Cheruvu is the President and CEO of Bitterroot Bio, a Palo Alto-based biotech pioneering the field of cardio-immunology — the intersection of the immune system and cardiovascular disease. A Rhodes Scholar, board-certified cardiologist, and physician-scientist who trained at Duke, Oxford, Harvard/MIT, Johns Hopkins, and UCSF, Cheruvu is guiding Bitterroot Bio's lead program BRB-002 — a first-in-class CD47-targeting therapy for atherosclerosis — through clinical development after a landmark $145M Series A in 2023 and positive Phase 1 results in 2025.
Gagan Singh
Gagan Singh is the Chief Executive Officer of Blackpoint Cyber, a Denver-based managed detection and response (MDR) company protecting small and mid-sized businesses through a channel-first MSP model. With 20+ years leading product and operations at McAfee, NortonLifeLock, and Avast, Singh joined Blackpoint in June 2025 with a clear thesis: small businesses are the most underserved, most targeted segment in cybersecurity, and the MSPs serving them are the true front line. Under his leadership, Blackpoint has launched CompassOne, a unified security posture platform, and continues expanding internationally while building on a claim that no partner or their customers has suffered a ransomware incident under Blackpoint's watch.
Chetan Puttagunta
Chetan Puttagunta is a General Partner at Benchmark, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where he has backed transformative companies in enterprise software, developer tools, and open-source infrastructure since 2018. Before Benchmark, he was a General Partner at NEA, where he led investments in MongoDB, MuleSoft, and Elastic — a trifecta of open-source commercial powerhouses. Born in Hyderabad and raised in Maryland, he graduated from Stanford with a degree in Electrical Engineering before cutting his teeth in tech investment banking. A self-described 'gulab jamun enthusiast,' he's known for his sharp conviction on open-source business models, his collaborative boardroom style, and his ability to find the best Indian desserts in Scotland.
Manu Kumar
Dr. Manu Kumar is the founder and Chief Firestarter of K9 Ventures, the firm credited with coining the term 'pre-seed' and pioneering institutional pre-seed investing in Silicon Valley. A serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped his first company with $5,000 and sold it for $100M+ before age 25, Manu holds a PhD from Stanford and has backed companies like Lyft, Twilio, and Carta from their earliest days. He is also co-founder and CEO of HiHello, reimagining professional identity for the digital age.
Deepak Kamra
Deepak Kamra is a General Partner at Canaan Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most enduring venture capitalists with over 33 years at a single firm. An Indian immigrant who grew up in Canada, he has backed landmark companies including DoubleClick (acquired by Google), Match.com, SuccessFactors (acquired by SAP), Skybox Imaging (acquired by Google for $500M), and ON24 (IPO at ~$3B in 2021 after a 22-year journey from a $12M investment). He is a passionate immigration advocate who has testified before Congress, a microfinance champion funding entrepreneurs in the Global South, a bass guitarist, avid cyclist, and world traveler who has visited over 80 countries.
Vishal Garg
Vishal Garg is the Indian-American founder and CEO of Better.com, the online mortgage broker that went public via SPAC in 2023. A serial entrepreneur since his early twenties, he previously co-founded MyRichUncle, which became the second-largest private student lender in the U.S. before collapsing in the 2008 financial crisis. Known for his blunt communication style - including the infamous 2021 Zoom firing of 900 employees - Garg has built multiple companies at the intersection of finance and technology while living in Manhattan with his wife and three children.
Manan Mehta
Manan Mehta is the Founding Managing Partner of Unshackled Ventures, the only venture capital firm in the US built exclusively to back immigrant founders at the pre-seed stage - before product, before revenue, and often before incorporation. A first-generation American born to Indian immigrants in Sunnyvale, CA, Manan turned a personal experience of watching his H-1B co-founder get shackled by visa constraints into a $35M+ fund that has sponsored 200+ founders, completed 231+ immigration filings, and helped build a portfolio that has collectively raised $730M+ and created 1,200+ jobs. He sits on the Nasdaq board, once helped ink the $1.9B Skype acquisition as a banker, and brings to every pitch meeting the lens of someone who knows exactly what it costs to build from scratch.
Shruti Gandhi
Shruti Gandhi is the General Partner and Founding Engineer of Array Ventures, a pre-seed fund backing technical founders building enterprise data, AI infrastructure, security, and developer tools. A former IBM engineer turned startup founder turned VC, she made the leap from Mumbai to Manhattan to the Bay Area armed with a Columbia CS degree and a Chicago Booth MBA. With 100+ investments, 15+ exits (to Apple, Amazon, PayPal, ServiceNow, and others), and 25,000+ Substack subscribers, she is one of a vanishingly small cohort of women of color who raised and run their own VC fund - and she teaches AI at Columbia on the side.
Sriram Krishnan
Sriram Krishnan is the Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence under President Trump, appointed January 2025. A Chennai-born engineer turned VC, he is one of few tech operators to have held senior product roles at Facebook, Snap, and Twitter simultaneously. As a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) from 2021 to 2024, he opened the firm's first international office in London. He co-authored the American AI Action Plan and co-hosts The Aarthi and Sriram Show podcast with his wife. Named a Time 'Architect of Artificial Intelligence' in 2025.
Niraj Shah
Niraj Shah is the CEO, Co-Founder, and Co-Chairman of Wayfair, Inc. (NYSE: W), the largest online home furnishings retailer in the United States. Starting from a spare bedroom with a TV-stand website in 2002, he and co-founder Steve Conine built a portfolio of 200+ niche e-commerce sites before consolidating into the Wayfair brand in 2011 and taking the company public in 2014. Known for his data-driven management style, demanding work ethic, and long-term vision, Shah has grown Wayfair to $12.5 billion in annual revenue and returned it to operating profitability in 2025.
Neville Medhora
Neville Medhora is a self-made copywriter, course creator, and entrepreneur who never held a traditional job. He built a drop-shipping business at 17, helped grow AppSumo to 750,000 customers through email, and turned a single copywriting course into a $1M/year business with zero employees. His platform CopywritingCourse.com (originally 'Kopywriting Kourse') has taught 20,000+ students how to write persuasive copy. He also runs SwipeFile.com and publishes the SWIPES newsletter weekly.
Nick Mehta
Nick Mehta co-founded Gainsight in 2013 and spent 13 years as CEO building the defining customer success platform - growing it from a startup into a $1.1 billion unicorn acquired by Vista Equity Partners, and in the process creating an entirely new job category of Customer Success Manager now held by hundreds of thousands of professionals worldwide. A Harvard-educated biochemist turned serial entrepreneur with a penchant for Taylor Swift parody rap videos, he stepped down as CEO in August 2025 to make way for his hand-picked successor while continuing on the board.