Tons of professors in the US, founders and 2 IAS officers!
Rank 1 — Sanjeev Arora
Princeton CS professor, 2x Godel Prize winner and overall legend. Didn't finish IITK, transferred to MIT
Rank 2 — Anmol Mathur
— IIT Delhi, PhD from UIUC
— Silicon Graphics, Cadence Design Systems
— Cofounder / CTO of Calypto Design Systems, acq in 2015
— Currently Distinguished Engg (L9) at Google
Rank 3 — Manoj Govil
Information on him is scant, but all I could find is that he has a PhD in Corporate Affairs from Princeton before going into IAS — an elite wing of the Indian government which requires an equally competitive examination, the UPSC.
Rank 4 — Ramesh Viswanathan
— PGM for being top ranking student at IITK
— PhD from Computer Science
— 20yrs at Bell Labs! before being an engineer at Google to date
Rank 5 — Arnab Mukherjea
— IITK and MBA from IIM Calcutta
— 21yr career at Citi across 3 cities
— Chief Risk at RV Capital, a $1B AUM fund founded by rank 20 that year, Ranodeb Roy (from my hs)
— Head of Asia Risk at Capula in Hong Kong, a $30B British hedge fund
Rank 6 — Chanchal Kumar
IIT Kanpur and International Development at Duke before also becoming an IAS officer for the Indian government after clearing the UPSC exam.
Rank 7 — Rahul Sarpeshkar
The interdisciplinarian.
— From St. Joseph's in Bangalore
— Went to MIT instead of IIT for electrical engg & physics
— PhD at Caltech and joined Bell Labs
— became a professor at MIT
— currently an insanely multidisciplinary professor at Dartmouth
Rank 8 — Vivek Sarin
Professor.
— CS from IIT Delhi 1990, MS from UMinnesota and then PhD from UIUC
— current a professor at Texas A&M in Computer Science
Rank 9 — GD Ramkumar
Serial entrepreneur.
— IIT Madras CS and PhD at Stanford under Rajeev Motwani
— Various software jobs before founding Snaptell. Sold to Amazon A9 and led their visual search
— Founded Concept IO before selling to Apple for $30M and staying ever since
Rank 10 — Amit Baranwal
— IITK CS and masters at OSU
— 20yrs at Citrix
— SVP of Product at private VC backed company, Datacore which builds software defined storage
Rank 12 — Pravin Bhagwat
— IITK CS before doing a PhD in U Maryland
— 5yrs at IBM Watson before founding Mojo Networks which was acquired by Arista for $120M
— Spent 6yrs there vesting his shares
— Semi-retired back to India to run his foundation, 14 Trees
In this year, of the 11 people barring the missing ones:
— 6 PhDs, 2 MS, 1 MBA and 2 in govt
— 7 in US, 3 in India, 1 Singapore
— 3 founders, 3 profs, 2 industry, 2 IAS, 1 finance
— 2 went to MIT not IIT
As always, this isnt meant to be a success test, but a view of life of those once at the very top!
Source: I'm using a proprietary dataset of year 1985 - 2000 and public LinkedIn for this. I'm going to be posting more such stuff in the coming months!
So far, I've covered 1986, 1992, 1998 and 2009.
This post was originally shared by Debarghya (Deedy) Das on Linkedin.