"Visit any Silicon Valley technology company, and you’ll notice that it looks like the United Nations—with people from all over the world working together toward a common goal. It wasn’t always like this. Back when Silicon Valley was still developing semiconductors, it was largely white in complexion. As the Valley evolved and grew, it started attracting the best and brightest from all over the world. At first it was the Europeans, and then the Taiwanese. Then the whole world came.
Indians have done amazingly well as entrepreneurs in the Valley, but other groups—African Americans and women, to name two—remain largely out of sight. As an Indian-born immigrant and tech entrepreneur myself, I have first-hand experience of some modes of thinking that, frankly, shocked me and rocked my belief in the Valley's story of its own openness. It appears to me that despite the success of Indians, meritocracy in the tech industry may be a mirage.
Indians have done amazingly well as entrepreneurs in the Valley, but other groups—African Americans and women, to name two—remain largely out of sight. As an Indian-born immigrant and tech entrepreneur myself, I have first-hand experience of some modes of thinking that, frankly, shocked me and rocked my belief in the Valley's story of its own openness. It appears to me that despite the success of Indians, meritocracy in the tech industry may be a mirage.
he seminal research on immigrants and diversity in Silicon Valley was conducted by University of California-Berkeley professor AnnaLee Saxenian, who published a paper titled “Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs” in 1999. Saxenian found that immigrants accounted for one-third of the scientific and engineering workforce in Silicon Valley, and that Indian or Chinese CEOs were running a quarter of its high-technology firms. Saxenian analyzed data on firms founded in Silicon Valley from 1980 to 1998. Some 17% of the tech firms were run by Chinese immigrants (including Taiwanese) and 7% by Indians.
In 2006, my research team collaborated with Saxenian to update her work. The trend she’d seen in Silicon Valley had become a nationwide phenomenon. Among U.S. tech companies founded between 1995 and 2005, 25.3% had a chief executive or lead technologist who was foreign-born. These companies generated $52 billion in revenue and employed 450,000 workers in 2005. In some industries, such as semiconductors, the percentages were much higher: Immigrants founded 35.2% of startups''.
Source: Reuters By Vivek Wadhwa
