In June, Forbes released the 8th annual list of America’s richest self-made women. It recorded the country’s top female entrepreneurs, who have created a great impact in their respective fields. The list includes:
- Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO of Arista Networks
- Neerja Sethi, co-founder of Syntel
- Neha Narkhede, co-founder, and former chief technology officer of Confluent
- Indra Nooyi PepsiCo’s former chair and CEO
- Reshma Shetty, co-founder of Gingko Bioworks
Jayshree Ullal:
Jayshree Ullal, 61, president and CEO of Arista Networks, tops the Indian Americans. Arista Networks is a computer networking firm. Ullal, was raised in India, has a net worth of $1.8 bn and stands 15th on the Forbes rich list.
According to Forbes, Jayshree owns about five per cent of Arista’s stock. Later she joined snowflake, a cloud computing company.
Jayshree studied electrical engineering from San Francisco State University. And Engineering management at Santa Clara University.
Neerja Sethi:
Neerja Sethi stands at 24th place in the Forbes rich list with a net worth of $1 bn. Along with her husband Bharat Desai, she co-founded Syntel, the IT consulting and outsourcing firm.
In October 2018, French IT firm Atos SE bought Syntel for $3.4 billion.
Neerja is a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and MBA in Operations Research from Delhi University. She has a master’s in computer science from Oakland University.
Neha Narkhede:
Neha Narkhede, the co-founder, and former CTO of Confluent ranked #57 with a total net worth of $490 million. In 2014, Neha Narkhede and two colleagues left Linked-in to found Confluent.
The company went public in June 2021 at a $9.1 Bn valuation, of which Narkhede and her family own around 8 per cent. She studied Bachelor of Engineering from Pune University. Narkhede studied Computer Science at Georgia Tech.
Indra Nooyi:
The former PepsiCo CEO, Indra Nooyi comes in at #85 with a total net worth of $320 million. She served as CEO and chair of PepsiCo for 12 years before stepping down in 2018 and as chair in 2019.
She joined Amazon’s board in 2019. The Forbes magazine reported her major fortune comes from the stock she was granted because of her sting at PepsiCo.
During her tenure, Indra Nooyi formed a breakup of the company, to double sales to $65 billion. She also introduced healthier products and environmentally friendly practices. She joined Amazon’s board in 2019.
Nooyi received bachelor’s degrees in physics, chemistry, and mathematics from the University of Madras, Master of Business Administration in Public and Private Management, Yale School of Management.
Reshma Shetty:
At #97 comes in Reshma Shetty in the Forbes rich list with a net worth of $750 Mn. Shetty, 41, co-founded Gingko Bioworks, a synthetic biotechnology company, in 2009 with her husband, Barry Canton and 3 others.
Gingko uses data analytics and robotics to speed up the process of discovering and making new organisms.
Shetty studied Bachelor of Science from University of Utah. She did PhD in biological engineering from MIT, Cambridge where she met her fellow co-founders.
“We didn’t start Ginkgo to make money or because we wanted to be ‘founders’ or because we thought it was a cool thing to do. We did it because we wanted to make it faster, cheaper and easier [to do research],” Shetty said.
What is Forbes?
Forbes family and Integrated Whale Media Investments owns Forbes is an American business magazine.
It features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics published 8 times a year. The magazine is well known for its lists and rankings, including of the richest Americans, Forbes 30 under 30, Forbes 50 under 50 and many more…
