Meet Jayshree Ullal, Indian-American CEO among richest self-made women in US

Over the past few decades, Indian women have managed to get their foot in the doors to enter the workplace across sectors especially FMCG, armed forces, IT, and banking. While there is an improvement in the social and economic position of Indian women, women reaching the senior and top management and becoming a self-made billionaires are far and few.

Among those who have proved their mettle is Jayshree V Ullal, the president and CEO of Arista Networks, a computer networking firm.

Ullal has been listed on the Forbes list of America's richest self-made women. With a net worth of $1.9 billion, Ullal owns 5% of Arista's stock.

Born in London and raised in India, Ullal studied at the Convent of Jesus & Mary school.

She went on to study electrical engineering at San Francisco State University and engineering management at Santa Clara University.

As President and CEO of Arista for over a decade, Jayshree Ullal is responsible for Arista’s business and thought leadership in cloud networking. Ullal ranks 15th on the Forbes list.

She led the company to a historic and successful IPO in June 2014 from zero to a multibillion-dollar business.

Formerly Jayshree was Senior Vice President at Cisco, responsible for a $10B business in the datacenter, switching, and services. In August 2018, Arista settled a multi-year patent infringement battle with Cisco, Ullal's former employer, agreeing to pay Cisco $400 million.

With more than 30 years of networking experience, she is the recipient of numerous awards including E&Y’s “Entrepreneur of the Year” in 2015, Barron’s “World’s Best CEOs” in 2018, and one of Fortune’s “Top 20 Business persons” in 2019.

Ullal is not the only one who made the billionaire list, the other Indian-American women are Neerja Sethi (Syntel co-founder), Neha Narkhede (Confluent co-founder), Indra Nooyi (former CEO of PepsiCo), and Reshma Shetty (cofounder of Gingko Bioworks). Diane Hendricks, co-founder and chairman of ABC Supply, topped the list for the fifth year.