Governor Gavin Newsom appoints Los Angeles-based Vishesh Anand as Senior Advisor at California's newly formed Housing and Homelessness Agency.
Welltower chairman and CEO Shankh Mitra becomes the highest-paid Indian-origin business leader on the planet with an $821.1 million pay package.
The global cybersecurity market is approaching $300 billion. Two of the three most important cybersecurity companies in the world — Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks — are led by Indian-origin executives. The third, CrowdStrike, was co-founded by an Indian-American. The pattern is not a coincidence.
One story starts with a Gujarati immigrant buying a struggling motel in California in the 1970s with community savings and zero industry experience. The other starts with an IIT engineer arriving in Silicon Valley and climbing to CEO. Both are Indian-American success stories. Both are mostly invisible in the same telling of the diaspora narrative.
The Indian-American community is 1.5% of the US population. It produces 8.3% of founders at US unicorns. It holds 11 Fortune 500 CEO chairs overseeing $6.5 trillion in combined market cap. It accounts for 71% of all US H-1B visas. Its combined annual income exceeds $730 billion globally.
The first generation of Indian professionals in America worked to build individual economic security. The second generation is deploying that security as capital — into Indian startups, into American startups built by Indian founders, and into funds whose entire thesis is that the diaspora's networks and knowledge produce better returns in India than most outsiders can access.
She joined Etsy in 2011. She became its first Head of Marketplace Integrity. Then Chief Product Officer. Then CEO of Depop. Then President and Chief Growth Officer. Then, on January 1, 2026, CEO of Etsy itself. The career arc is not a story about being in the right place at the right time. It is a story about being the right person, built over fourteen years of doing the work at every level of the same organisation.
He eventually became a Goldman Sachs banker, a real estate CEO, a 4x Inc. 500 entrepreneur, and the CEO of one of the most followed business platforms in America. His starting point was not his story. It was just the first chapter.
Apurva Shrivastava grew up in Michigan, personally handling thousands of customer calls for small businesses. He learned a brutal lesson early on: in the home services world, if you don't answer the phone, you don't get the job. That lesson became the foundation of a $1 billion startup.
His father's dream was to see him study in America. His own dream was to study electrical engineering at Berkeley. The US Embassy said no three times. On the fourth attempt — after his father personally spoke to the consul — the visa came.