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1) If you want to make big bucks and have fast career growth, you have to work in big tech
Parag Agrawal is a 2005 Computer Science graduate from IIT Bombay. After 6 years in his Ph.D. program at Stanford, he joined Twitter in October 2011. Within ten years, he had risen from being an Ads software engineer at Twitter to being at CEO. By 37, he is already a CEO, the youngest in the S&P 500 CEO list (even younger than Mark Zuckerberg). Most software engineers barely become software managers in ten years, but Parag is the CEO in the same time.
While Parag did not make even make the top 5 highly paid list in Twitter as the CTO last year, he will now make the highest salary with a base salary of 1 million, bonus of 1.5 million and restricted stock options of 12.5 million dollars.
One reason for the fast career growth is that when Parag joined Twitter, it had less than 1000 employees. Joining technology companies in the early phases, when they are growing fast, is the best way to progress your career in the bay area.
2) Chase your passions and focus on building the right skills
Parag had a strong interest in Machine learning which enabled him to grow fast in Twitter. He rose to become its first distinguished engineer and Twitter’s CTO in 6 years. Parag was a hardcore engineer leading work on Twitter’s new cryptocurrency and decentralization project, Bluesky. His doctoral guide, Jennifer Widom remarked that Parag would never have gone to business school. After joining Twitter in 2011, his Ph.D. guide had a tough time getting him back to finishing his doctoral program in 2012.
Machine Learning is among the hottest spaces to specialize in. He led a Machine Learning team early in his career and improved relevancy of relevant tweets in user timelines. Once, in preparation for Twitter’s hack week, he read several books and took courses in machine learning just to get ready for it. It is rumored that Parag’s technical experience favored him when Jack Dorsey wanted to pick someone who could help with the transition to the much-discussed Metaverse of the future.
It is commonly said that to be a CEO, you have to be better in your job than everyone else around you and demonstrate a certain mastery that nobody else has. Certainly, Parag stood out in many ways.
3) Forget raw brainpower, luck and hardwork is more important
This may seem counterintuitive. Parag has a strong academic background, studying computer science at prestigious schools, IIT Bombay and at Stanford. He secured the 77th rank in the IIT entrance exam out of some 300,000 applicants and was the topper of his batch. But life is unpredictable. The topper of the IIT entrance exam of the same batch, who had the highest ever GPA at another IIT, went to MIT for a doctoral program in Computer Science, graduating at the same time as Parag. He is currently a senior staff Machine Learning engineer at Twitter, while a colleague is the CEO.
While Parag and Sundar Pichai (Google) went to Stanford; Shantanu Narayen (Adobe) and Satya Nadella (Microsoft) went to low key programs at Bowling Green State and the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee initially for their Masters programs. Sometimes more than sheer brilliance; luck and hardwork can also play an important role.
While there are 4.5 million tech professionals in India, career growth in Indian tech companies and US subsidiaries is tepid to say the least. Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Nikesh Arora (Palo Alto Networks), Raghu Raghuram (VMWare) and Shantanu Narayen needed to do a MS and MBA from the US to establish themselves. Arvind Krishna (IBM) and Parag needed to do Ph.D. programs to gain the right skill sets. While double Masters programs or Ph.D. programs is an extraordinary investment in education, Indians have needed to do a lot more through higher education to prove themselves.
4) The Indian middle class is keeping the American dream alive
While the American dream may have soured with most Americans with a decrease in social mobility and opportunities, Indians and Asians are keeping the American dream afloat with their extraordinary focus on education.
Whether it is Sundar Pichai (Google) attending Stanford and Wharton, Arvind Krishna (IBM) attending UIUC, Satya Nadella (Microsoft) attending Chicago Booth or Shantanu Narayen (Adobe) attending Berkeley Haas; US graduate programs and the H1B working visa has been a tremendous lure for bright talent from India. All of the mentioned CEO’s had a middle class upbringing with parents working as stenographers, managers in MNC subsidiaries, the Indian Administrative service or as college professors.
Parag’s mother worked as a management professor at a local engineering college in Mumbai and his father at India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. His sister has a Ph.D. from MIT and is a faculty member at Washington University.
5) This wave of Indians and Asians is just the tip of the iceberg
More than 40-50% of employees in companies in FANG companies are people of Indian and Asian origin. These numbers can only go higher up as Computer Science programs are reporting that 68% of students are non-white. Computer Science is a lot of hard work with a heavy emphasis on Mathematics. Rarely do students in any other country outside Asia take Mathematics and Computer Science this seriously.
Other CEO’s of Indian origin include Raghu Raghuram (VM Ware), Ajay Banga (Mastercard), Jay Chaudhry (Zscaler), Jayshree Ullal (Arista), Nikesh Arora (Palo Alto Networks), Sanjay Mehrotra (Micron) and George Kurien (Google Cloud).
Other Indian CTO’s and CXO’s waiting in the wings are Raghu Hiremaglur (Linkedin), Liz Centoni (Cisco), Sri Shivananda (Paypal), Raji Arasu (Autodesk), Suresh Kumar (Walmart), Manish Gupta (Coinbase), Raj Subramaniam (Fedex). We will probably see more Indian CEO’s emerge as companies grapple with the technology transformations of the future and more students enter the workforce.
See more such content at my YT channel: VinCareerTalks
Sources:
https://www1.salary.com/TWITTER-INC-Executive-Salaries.html
https://www.linkedin.com/in/parag-agrawal-5a14742a/
https://www.protocol.com/meet-parag-agrawal-twitter-ceo
https://www.apple.com/diversity/
https://engineering.wustl.edu/faculty/Kunal-Agrawal.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/technology/parag-agrawal-twitter.html
