Jayshree Ullal becomes first female Indian American billionaire

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NEW YORK – Jayshree Ullal has become the first Indian American female billionaire with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion, according to Forbes.com

Ullal was born in London, England in 1961, grew up in New Delhi, India, and came to the U.S. when her dad got a new job here.

She then received her bachelor’s in electrical engineering from San Francisco State University and her master’s in engineering management from Santa Clara University, after which she began her career at Advanced Micro Devices.

She then went onto work at Fairchild Semiconductor and Ungermann-Bass where she served as the director of internet working products.

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Ullal ended up becoming the vice president of marketing at Crescendo Communications which was taken over by Cisco in 1993 and became the senior vice president of Data Center, Switching & Security Technology Group of the company, overseeing more than 20 mergers and acquisitions.

Ullal left Cisco in 2008 to become the president and CEO of Arista Networks, a small startup that grew under her leadership.

Arista Network, which was originally founded by David Cheriton and Andy Bechtolsheim, both who became billionaires by investing in Google early on, reported $1.6 billion in revenue in 2017 after Ullal took over, according to Celebrity Net Worth.

But Arista’s growth threatened Cisco and they decided to file a lawsuit against the small company in 2014 accusing them of stealing its patents, a fight that is still going on.

Ullal has also served as the senior vice president of the Optical Networking Group, the vice president and general manager of the LAN Switching in the Enterprise Line of Business and the co-leader of the Service Provider Business Council.

She currently serves as a director and member on the Advisory Board of StorSimple, Inc., the director of Zscaler, Inc., the director of Movius Interactive Corporation and the director of Nishan Systems, Inc., according to Bloomberg.

Ullal was nominated by Newsweek as one of the 20 most powerful “Women to Watch in 2001.”

According to Ullal’s bio on Arista’s website, she was named as one of the “50 Most Powerful People” in Network World in 2005 as well as one of the “Top Executives” by Forbes magazine in 2012. She was co-awarded the “EY 2015 Entrepreneur of the Year” across the nation along with being named the “#3 IT Industry Disrupter” by CRN. She received the 2013 Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award at SCU and the SFSU Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016.

Within the last three years Ullal has not only “streamlined and doubled the metro optical business while forging key alliances with major service provider customers” but has also brought a small company like Arista Networks to the top in a competitive network, said Forbes.