Sheel Mohnot@pitdesi
Most people don’t understand that the Indian bigco CEO phenomenon is mostly an immigration story. Indians are FAR more likely to be tied to employment visas than other nationalities, so they couldn’t easily start companies.
The 1990 Immigration Act created the modern H-1B/EB green card system. As Indian demand exploded, the 7% per-country cap turned into decades-long backlogs for Indians. Indian tech workers stayed tethered to sponsoring employers in a way Europeans, Russians, Taiwanese never had to. Founding a company means risking your status, resetting a green card path, or finding another workaround (now usually O-1 or EB-1).
European/ Russian /Taiwanese immigrants don’t face the same trap. Their countries don’t hit the 7% per-country cap, so demand stays under the limit. A German or Russian engineer on H-1B can get a green card in 1-2 years and leave to found a company. An Indian engineer doing the same job has to wait 20+ years.
The 1965-1989 Indian cohort was much smaller but not yet trapped by today’s H-1B lottery and India backlog machine. That’s why you see so many Indian founders from that era: Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems), Sanjay Mehrotra (SanDisk, before becoming CEO of Micron), Kanwal Rekhi (Excelan), Suhas Patil (Cirrus Logic), Desh Deshpande (Sycamore Networks), Pradeep Sindhu (Juniper Networks), etc.
My dad is a 1972 IIT grad who came to America for a PhD. Most of his IIT friends are successful entrepreneurs. My cousin took the same exact path (IIT>CMU) in the 1990s and most of his friends worked their way up corporate jobs because they needed employment sponsorship.
IMO this is bad for America. We took the highest-conviction risk-takers on earth, people who crossed an ocean and left their families behind, and forced them into the lowest-risk career path.
Fortunately this has been loosened in the 2010s with O-1 and EB-1A workarounds but it’s still much more challenging for Indian or Chinese founders.
