Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla and Hotmail cofounder Sabeer Bhatia stand as pioneers among technology's barons. Their rise from immigrants to industry legends symbolizes the profound, though less visible, South Asian business encounter with America, as the United States' high-technology industry reaps tremendous rewards from the tenacity and technological-savviness of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. A first wave of "highly educated [Indus] people" starts immigrating to America in the mid-1960s "for higher studies," and most immigrants of this influx stay to work. When the immigrants find themselves unable to climb the corporate ladder in the 1970s, some leave to form their own companies, as does former Advanced Microsystems president Saiyed Atiq Raza. Others construct professional organizations based upon ethnic ties to mentor new arrivals to the Valley and to financially support members' ventures. Indo-Americans now rank among Silicon Valley's most influential technology developers and entrepreneurs.

Immigrants bring culture in addition to engineering skills. Silicon Valley firms now cater to the employees' palates, as company cafeterias now stock Indian dishes. Religious identity appears important to the group, as Johnathan Thaw finds that Hindus make up 83 % of Silicon Valley's Indians. President Clinton even issues a proclamation in 2000 to acknowledge Diwali, "the ancient Festival of Lights," upon the suggestion of one Silicon Valley Indian supporter.

Statistics greatly reveal South Asians' influence on Silicon Valley. Though RN 313 attempts to characterize Hinduism's place in America, one can find very little data on Hinduism's influence specifically. Instead, one must rely upon Thaw's discovery that most Indo-Americans identify themselves as Hindu in order to ascertain the prominence of Hindus among Silicon Valley's South Asians.

• Silicon Valley's Indians represent a "very highly educated" community. 98 % of Thaw's respondents arrive in Silicon Valley with an undergraduate degree, and 78 % have attained "some form of post-graduate qualification".
• 1990 census information indicates that "Indians made up 23 percent of the region’s Asian-born engineers".
• 28,520 Asian Indians work in Silicon Valley as of 1999.
• 82% of the Indian migrants work in high-technology fields. According to Thaw, "Occupations involving computers and communications accounted for 26 percent of respondents, software for 56 percent and semiconductor/equipment for 6 percent".
• Forbes magazine named seven Indian immigrants to its list of the wealthiest Americans in the year 2000: Sanjiv Sidhu with $ 9.8 billion, Gururaj Deshpande with $ 7.6 billion, Pradeep Sindhu with $2.6 billion, Naveen Jain with $2.2 billion, Rajendra Singh with $ 1.4 billion, Romesh Wadhwani with $1.3 billion, Vinod Khosla with $ 1 billion
• Indian CEOs lead 16,598 individuals of 774 Silicon Valley firms in 1998.
• America's Indian population "numbers about one million, and its median family income ranks among the highest in the nation".

• Over 1,000 Indians have founded Silicon Valley companies, and those companies have a total value of "more than $40 billion".
• Indians begin "10 per cent of the start-ups in Silicon Valley between 1995 and 1998".
• "40% of all start-up companies include Indian Americans on staff".
• Though "only 14% of Indian immigrants have gone into business for themselves, " as compared to 33 % self-employment for Korean immigrants, one venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, "says 40% of its portfolio consists of companies founded or managed by persons of Indian origin"
• Indians start 23 percent of Silicon Valley e-commerce companies.

• 78 % of respondents to Thaw's study "return to India every other year or more often".
• Over 50 % of Thaw's respondents communicate each week with friends at home.
• 65 % of migrants send money back to India, and over 25 % of those migrants give one-fifth or more of their income.

• Indians make up 46 % of H-1B visa recipients, and receive "about 20% of all the H1B visas issued each year, by far the largest proportion."
• Indian migrants have social, business, or familial links to Silicon Valley before departing India. " 57 percent of respondents had friends in Silicon Valley prior to migrating, 43 percent had family contacts, and 9 percent had business contacts already established".
• Migrants accompany migrants. "57 percent of Indians migrating to the United States came with either friends and/or family".

• Jonathan Thaw's bachelor's thesis on the role of Indians in Silicon Valley.
• Professor Anna Lee Saxenian's groundbreaking work on Indians and Chinese in America.

Amar Bose	Vijay Vashee
S. Atiq Raza	Vinod Khosla

• Silicon India
• Profiles of the Indian Digerati
• An Indian professional organization--The IndUS Entrepeneurs
• Silicon Valley Indian Professionals Association (SIPA)
• NRI site--"Citizens of the world. Indians at heart."

 Please email questions or comments on this page to Raj Ashar.