Jayshree Ullal, the president and CEO of Arista Networks, a cloud networking company, has topped the most recent Hurun India Rich List of professionals with exceptional net worth. The list includes professionals with exceptional net worth who are managers or business owners of Indian origin.
Interestingly, Ullal has surpassed Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, and Neal Mohan, who are the CEOs of tech giants Google, Microsoft, and YouTube, respectively.
However, given Ullal”s past achievements, her success is not surprising. She began her career as a senior strategic development engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor and later joined Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), where she designed high-speed memory chips for IBM and Hitachi. In 1988, she joined Ungermann-Bass, where she was the director of the company”s internetworking business unit.
In March 1992, Ullal became the vice president of marketing at Crescendo Communications, a maker of Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) network products. In 1993, Cisco Systems acquired Crescendo Communications, marking Cisco”s first acquisition and first foray into the switching market.
Ullal joined Cisco and began work on the Cisco Catalyst switching business, which grew from its beginning in 1993 to a $5 billion business in 2000. By 2005, she became Senior Vice President of the Data Center, Switching and Security Technology Group at Cisco. In October 2008, Ullal was named CEO & President of Arista Networks.
Currently, with her 5% holding in Arista Network”s stock, Ullal has a net worth of $2.2 billion (around Rs.18,199 crore) according to Forbes. Ullal was born in London but raised in India, where she had her schooling in New Delhi. She pursued a B.S. in electrical engineering from San Francisco State University and then attained a master”s degree in engineering management from Santa Clara University.
She has been named among the “top five most influential people in the networking industry” and “World”s Best CEOs.” She led Arista to a successful IPO in 2014. Jayshree is married to Vijay Ullal, himself a former top tech executive who is now a venture capitalist. They have two daughters and reside in Saratoga, California. Ullal”s late sister Susie Nagpal was a politician who was on the Saratoga City council in the US.