The rise of Asian American leaders in tech

Editor’s Note: Jeff Yang is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal Online and contributes frequently to radio shows, including Public Radio International’s “The Takeaway” and WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.” He is the co-author of “I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action” and editor of the graphic novel anthologies “Secret Identities” and “Shattered.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

When Google announced this week that it is reorganizing itself under a new parent company called Alphabet, reactions were fast and furious, ranging from shock at the unexpected move to amusement at the quizzically goofy name to praise for the strategic clarity the change might bring to a company whose founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have been notoriously prone to distraction.

But perhaps the most interesting outcome from the shakeup is the promotion of Sundar Pichai as Google’s new CEO, a move that, based on Pichai’s swift ascent at the company, had been more a matter of “when,” not “if.”

Jeff Yang

Page and Brin will oversee Alphabet, giving Pichai complete latitude in running Google, currently the sixth largest tech company in the world, and arguably the one most omnipresent in our digital lives.

Pichai, born in Chennai, India, and a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, is just the latest in a growing number of other top tech CEOs who share a common ancestry in India and status as immigrants to the United States.

Striking it rich in tech —

In perhaps the most famous entrepreneur story of the 21st century, Mark Zuckerberg and several classmates founded Facebook from a Harvard dorm room in 2004. Facebook now has more than 1 billion users worldwide, and Zuckerberg himself is worth about $30 billion, making him one of the world's richest men.

Striking it rich in tech —

A number of entrepreneurs have parlayed tiny tech startups into millions, or even billions. The latest to hit the jackpot: WhatsApp founders Brian Acton, left, and Jan Koum, who sold their mobile messaging service to Facebook for $19 billion in cash and stock.

Striking it rich in tech —

Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, left to right, started Twitter in 2006. The fast-growing company went public last year and is now worth more than $30 billion, making them all very wealthy.

Striking it rich in tech —

David Karp founded Tumblr, the blogging platform, in 2007 when he was 20 years old. Last year it was bought by Yahoo for $1.1 billion.

Striking it rich in tech —

Aaron Levie launched Box, his cloud-computing company, from his college dorm room in 2005. It now has more than 20 million users, and Levie has said Box will likely go public in 2014.

Striking it rich in tech —

Sergey Brin, left, and Larry Page founded Google in 1998 while graduate students at Stanford. The massive tech company went public in 2004, making them both billionaires.

Striking it rich in tech —

Reid Hastings, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, founded Netflix in 1998. The company pioneered the use of DVD rentals through the mail and is now a leader in streaming video, with more than 40 million subscribers.

Striking it rich in tech —

Kevin Systrom founded Instagram, the photo-sharing network, with Mike Krieger in 2010. In 2012, Facebook snapped it up for more than $700 million.

Striking it rich in tech —

Andrew Mason founded daily-deals site Groupon in 2008, turned down a reported $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and later took the company public. But he was fired as CEO of his company in early 2013 after Groupon began struggling.

Striking it rich in tech —

Snapchat was just a class project at Stanford University for Evan Spiegel. His classmates told him after his 2011 presentation that no one would be interested in an app that shared temporary photos. Now the company is valued at more than $860 million and Snapchat has reportedly turned down buyout offers of upward of $3 billion from Facebook and Google.

Striking it rich in tech —

In 1994, Jeff Bezos left his job at a Wall Street hedge fund and drove from New York to Seattle, writing up his business plan for Amazon along the way. He started the company in his garage, banking on continued growth in internet use. Five years later he was TIME's Person of the Year and now he's worth an estimated $29 billion.

Striking it rich in tech —

At age 31, Dropbox founder Drew Houston is worth $400 million, according to Forbes. That's not bad for a guy who had the idea for the cloud storage tool because he kept forgetting his USB drives when he was a student at MIT.

Striking it rich in tech —

Ben Silbermann quit his post-college job at Google in frustration after saying he wasn't allowed to create products. Several years later the product he went on to create, Pinterest, is valued at nearly $4 billion.

Striking it rich in tech —

In one of the tech world's most iconic origin stories, Apple began in 1976 with co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs tinkering in a Bay Area garage. The result? The world's most valuable technology company.

Striking it rich in tech

Prev Next

This list includes Satya Nadella, who in 2011 took the reins of the world’s fifth largest tech company, Microsoft; Sanjay Mehrotra, co-founder and CEO of memory chip mammoth SanDisk; and Shantanu Narayen, CEO of graphics software giant Adobe.

Their rise has challenged the long-held (and always false) notion that Asian-Americans have the ability to execute but not to lead — that cultural deficits, language gaps or lack of self-confidence are an insurmountable handicap for Asians, especially immigrant Asians, seeking to break into the C-suite.

That this shattering of the glass ceiling has occurred first and foremost in technology isn’t entirely surprising: Though the tech world has a long way to go to address other diversity concerns (namely, the painfully low percentage of women, blacks and Hispanics both in rank-and-file engineering roles and in leadership positions), the industry has been at the forefront