Jayshree V. Ullal, the Indian-American president and CEO of Arista Networks, the Silicon Valley-based cloud networking company, is among four women of Indian origin who came to the recent Forbes list of the 100 richest and most successful self-made women in America.
Featured at number 15 on the list, Ullal ranks first among Indian women business leaders.
According to Forbes, his publicly traded company, Arista Networks posted revenue of nearly $4.4 billion in 2022 and Ullal, who has been chairman and chief executive officer since 2008, owns about 2.4% of Arista’s shares. He is also on the board of directors of Snowflake, a cloud computing company that went public in September 2020.
In a recent interview with Indian times, Ullal, who is among Silicon Valley’s top CEOs and has taken his company from zero to a multi-billion dollar business and a historic and successful initial public offering in June 2014; he explained that he strongly believes in the Arista Way: doing the right thing for employees, customers and shareholders.
You are passionate about your company’s policy of carefully planning hiring without mass layoffs. “Never say never, but even in the good times, we were cautious in hiring and didn’t overdo it. Culturally we don’t like to hire and fire, and now we hope to avoid layoffs,” said one of America’s most respected technology CEOs. There have been occasional restructurings when it was necessary to cut some jobs, but Arista’s leadership was careful to reward top performers while managing the worst performers, Ullal explained.
And he doesn’t shy away from talking about the challenges of US immigration regulations faced by many Indian professionals.
“The immigration process is challenging and needs to change. The time it takes for permanent residence visas to be approved has increased to 5, 10 and 15 years, which is a large part of a professional person’s working life. I passed mine in a year,” said Ullal, who went to San Francisco State University for a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering after finishing high school in Delhi, he said.
While many Indian immigrants like her won the right to work in the US without issue and mixed in with the latest melting pot; they also helped add value, she strongly believes. “It is unfortunate that the immigration process is now at a standstill and getting worse after the pandemic.”
And now that many companies in the United States have to lay people off; Several young professionals in India are facing uncertainty on two fronts.
“If you have been around for as long as I have; you’ve seen the cyclical boom and bust in Silicon Valley. Usually there is a slowdown every 5 to 7 years, like in 2001 and 2007 and in the 90s; this was the longest golden period for 15 years without a commercial success. But it is unfortunate that companies, especially those that hired very quickly, had to fire people quickly,” Ullal lamented.
She sympathizes with the families who had made the US their home, both Indian and otherwise, and were affected by the layoffs, forcing them to leave and return to India or other countries with immigration rules. easier. “This is the risk and the reality of coming to work in a foreign country; everything doesn’t always go well, ”she said. But she also hoped employers would help laid-off employees find jobs elsewhere or at other companies.
“There are factors such as immigration status that employers cannot control; but they can help those laid off to find another job. It is the best they can do in this terrible situation,” she said.
Indian-American CEO, who has won numerous awards and recognitions, including Barron’s World’s Best CEOs in 2018; one of Fortune’s Top 20 Business People in 2019 and one of Forbes’ America’s Richest Self-Made Women in 2022; he is optimistic about the Indian and American Indian talent at Arista.
“At first, out of 30 Arista engineers, only two were Indian. But with our development center in India, which we started 12 years ago, and then with our acquisition of Mojo Networks in Pune, India is our largest international site,” he said. Furthermore, according to her, it is not surprising that India, with such a large population of educated and technologically skilled people, contributes among the largest numbers to Silicon Valley’s deep engineering talent pool.
“Many companies source talent in India for only certain roles; but for us, India is an equal citizen with equal opportunities. At Arista, we believe that the best developers can come from anywhere and there is a global distribution of engineering talent, virtual or physical. We followed this even before the pandemic and we will stay true to that,” Ullal said.
As a thought and business leader, he has watched artificial intelligence, which is considered the next big thing in technology, move from the labs and back rooms of scientific computing and training models to the real world in a very strong way. “At Arista, our responsibility now is to build our network to be more AI-relevant, high-quality, and lossless for big data and compute-intensive applications,” she said.
Featured at number 15 on the list, Ullal ranks first among Indian women business leaders.
According to Forbes, his publicly traded company, Arista Networks posted revenue of nearly $4.4 billion in 2022 and Ullal, who has been chairman and chief executive officer since 2008, owns about 2.4% of Arista’s shares. He is also on the board of directors of Snowflake, a cloud computing company that went public in September 2020.
In a recent interview with Indian times, Ullal, who is among Silicon Valley’s top CEOs and has taken his company from zero to a multi-billion dollar business and a historic and successful initial public offering in June 2014; he explained that he strongly believes in the Arista Way: doing the right thing for employees, customers and shareholders.
You are passionate about your company’s policy of carefully planning hiring without mass layoffs. “Never say never, but even in the good times, we were cautious in hiring and didn’t overdo it. Culturally we don’t like to hire and fire, and now we hope to avoid layoffs,” said one of America’s most respected technology CEOs. There have been occasional restructurings when it was necessary to cut some jobs, but Arista’s leadership was careful to reward top performers while managing the worst performers, Ullal explained.
And he doesn’t shy away from talking about the challenges of US immigration regulations faced by many Indian professionals.
“The immigration process is challenging and needs to change. The time it takes for permanent residence visas to be approved has increased to 5, 10 and 15 years, which is a large part of a professional person’s working life. I passed mine in a year,” said Ullal, who went to San Francisco State University for a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering after finishing high school in Delhi, he said.
While many Indian immigrants like her won the right to work in the US without issue and mixed in with the latest melting pot; they also helped add value, she strongly believes. “It is unfortunate that the immigration process is now at a standstill and getting worse after the pandemic.”
And now that many companies in the United States have to lay people off; Several young professionals in India are facing uncertainty on two fronts.
“If you have been around for as long as I have; you’ve seen the cyclical boom and bust in Silicon Valley. Usually there is a slowdown every 5 to 7 years, like in 2001 and 2007 and in the 90s; this was the longest golden period for 15 years without a commercial success. But it is unfortunate that companies, especially those that hired very quickly, had to fire people quickly,” Ullal lamented.
She sympathizes with the families who had made the US their home, both Indian and otherwise, and were affected by the layoffs, forcing them to leave and return to India or other countries with immigration rules. easier. “This is the risk and the reality of coming to work in a foreign country; everything doesn’t always go well, ”she said. But she also hoped employers would help laid-off employees find jobs elsewhere or at other companies.
“There are factors such as immigration status that employers cannot control; but they can help those laid off to find another job. It is the best they can do in this terrible situation,” she said.
Indian-American CEO, who has won numerous awards and recognitions, including Barron’s World’s Best CEOs in 2018; one of Fortune’s Top 20 Business People in 2019 and one of Forbes’ America’s Richest Self-Made Women in 2022; he is optimistic about the Indian and American Indian talent at Arista.
“At first, out of 30 Arista engineers, only two were Indian. But with our development center in India, which we started 12 years ago, and then with our acquisition of Mojo Networks in Pune, India is our largest international site,” he said. Furthermore, according to her, it is not surprising that India, with such a large population of educated and technologically skilled people, contributes among the largest numbers to Silicon Valley’s deep engineering talent pool.
“Many companies source talent in India for only certain roles; but for us, India is an equal citizen with equal opportunities. At Arista, we believe that the best developers can come from anywhere and there is a global distribution of engineering talent, virtual or physical. We followed this even before the pandemic and we will stay true to that,” Ullal said.
As a thought and business leader, he has watched artificial intelligence, which is considered the next big thing in technology, move from the labs and back rooms of scientific computing and training models to the real world in a very strong way. “At Arista, our responsibility now is to build our network to be more AI-relevant, high-quality, and lossless for big data and compute-intensive applications,” she said.
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