Interesting article on Indian networking

The comments also shed some light on the Indian diaspora in the UK vs. the US and the US culture's role in it. Good read.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/01808b14-4837-11e5-b3b2-1672f710807b.html#axzz3k5Gr4iea

Behind a subscription wall saar...

Sundar Pichai’s appointment this month as chief executive of the newly rejigged Google prompted happy outpourings across India. The US technology group will still be controlled by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But Mr Pichai’s rise to become their most senior lieutenant seemed to confirm the considerable achievements of India’s global diaspora.

Pride in eminent expatriates is common across developing economies. But it is especially warranted in India, whose émigrés have achieved great prominence in the US. Mr Pichai’s promotion follows a handful of others: Satya Nadella, for instance, who last year took the helm at Microsoft; or former Google executive Nikesh Arora, now heir presumptive at SoftBank, the Japanese telecoms group.

More interesting, though, are the wider accomplishments of Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.
At first this looks counterintuitive. Indians have a strong reputation as software developers, dating back to the first wave who arrived armed with elite engineering degrees in the 1980s. But that same group has since gone on a less heralded journey, outpacing once-dominant communities from Taiwan and China, to become the US’s most technologically entrepreneurial immigrants as well.

Today the contest is not even close. Immigrants either founded or co-founded around four in 10 Silicon Valley businesses between 2006 and 2012, according to the Kauffman Foundation — itself a remarkable statistic. Of those immigrant-founded companies, however, roughly a third were launched by Indians. The next most successful group, the Chinese, accounted for 5 per cent.
Indian immigrants in the US are numerous, highly educated and speak excellent English. This adds up to a powerful trio of traits that other foreign arrivals struggle to match, according to political scientist Devesh Kapur, co-author of a forthcoming book on the diaspora. As a result, Indians do well across corporate America, bagging top roles at blue-chip companies and Wall Street banks, and making Hinduism the country’s wealthiest religion per capita.

Yet this alone does not explain why they prosper in the technology sector, a phenomenon with deeper roots in the experience of the early engineers who first moved to California. Back then, employment at established tech companies came easily. But those who tried to launch start-ups found life more difficult, struggling to raise venture capital in particular.

The first crop of Indian entrepreneurs had similar stories of being held back by a system dominated by white Americans
The lesson drawn by these pioneers, says Vivek Wadhwa, entrepreneur and Stanford University fellow, was that you had to stick together. “The first crop of Indian entrepreneurs all had similar stories of being held back by a tech system dominated by white Americans,” he says. Those who succeeded, such as Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, became linchpins in a support system for their fellow nationals, ranging from formal business groups to ad hoc networks for mentoring and funding. “They decided they needed to help each other out.”

Nowadays, Indian executives are over-represented across Silicon Valley, especially at businesses that prize engineering talent, such as Google. But while the original need to break into the tech sector has passed, their habits of mutual support persists. Mr Pichai seems to embody this culture too, given the way colleagues describe him as technically brilliant, but also kind and helpful to others.

It might seem surprising that this kind of clubbing together was necessary. Silicon Valley is celebrated for its dense networks of funders and entrepreneurs. Evangelists portray the area as the ultimate open economic system; a freewheeling technological meritocracy, in which outsiders are welcome and good ideas rise to the top.

That is at best a half-fiction. The tech sector is not always collegiate, as recent revelations about Amazon’s work practices made clear. The same point is driven home by the anxious founders and backbiting coders of hit HBO comedy Silicon Valley .
Above all, successful innovators also tend to have the best contacts, opening closed doors to money and support. Those without access — foreigners, for instance, or women — must break into established networks or create others. And more than any other group of outsiders, it was the Indians who figured out that, to make it in start-up land, it helps to have a social network of your own.