Silicon Valley Saga Series

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The ride she hitched to a shelter that cold night was the start of a journey of self-discovery. She went back to school, worked her way through minimum wage, clawed her way between start-ups, and rode the tech wave in Silicon Valley like any turbo-charged male. ``That was just four years ago,'' grinned the plucky software engineer from Cisco. ``And this week I have just made my first million.''

While one hears any number of success stories in Silicon Valley involving Indian men, an extraordinary new development is taking place in the high-tech field. Indian women, for long homemakers, child-bearers, trophy wives, and occasional wage-earners in the US, are suddenly blossoming in a field that was hitherto thought to be amale preserve.

The results are already beginning to show. Cisco's vice-president Jayashree Ullal, Yahoo! Content Editor Srinija Srinivasan, DigitalLink Chairwoman Vinita Gupta, Smart Modular Co-Founder Lata Krishnan, Rightworks CEO Vani Kola, former Hewlett Packard GM and current CEO of Tioga Systems Radha Basu are among the achievers who have shown that when it comes to the tech world, they are in fine fettle too. Says Anu Shukla, CEO of the San Mateo-based Rubric, an e-marketing company, ``Our time has come.''

The biggest success story among Indian women though belongs to Srinija Srinivasan, vice-president and editor-in-chief of the wildly popular net destination Yahoo! Lesser known than the celebrated duo of Jerry Yang and David Philo who founded the company, ``Ninja,'' as she is nicknamed by her colleagues (because they found it hard to pronounce Srinija and also because of her felicity with Japanese) is quite likely the first Indian billionairess.

At 29 Born in India, Srinija arrived in US as athree-month-old. Her dad taught mathematics at the University of Kansas and her mom was a Sanskrit scholar who reinvented herself as a computer programmer. Srinija schooled at Stanford and in her junior year she went to intern in Japan where she met Yang and Philo, two Taiwanese students who could not speak a word of Japanese, a tongue Srinija had mastered.

Two years later when the celebrated duo launched Yahoo! They pulled Ninja out of a job where she was working on artificial intelligence, essentially trying to teach a computer the fundamentals of human knowledge.

Srinija was to be Yahoo!'s ontologist someone trained in the science of sorting information. But this was in 1994 and the net was just beginning to grow and spout uncontrollably. Trying to organise the web was the nearest thing to cleaning the Augean stables. But Ninja rolled up her sleeve and got to work, creating the basic structure of the Yahoo directory in 1995. Last year, her pioneering efforts landed her in Newsweek, which named heramong the 50 people who matter most on the Internet.

While Srinija ploughed a single and successful furrow, other Indian women entrepreneurs balanced jobs and children. Smart Modular's co-founder Lata Krishnan and Rightworks CEO Vani Kola, both mothers of two kids, combined a home life and professional success. With $3.9 million in salary and stock options, Lata Krishnan last year became the highest paid female executive in Silicon Valley.

Says Gita Lal, CEO of the Austin-based Daman Consulting who has powered her 1996 start-up to a $10 million-plus revenue company, ``Indian women are prospering because they find they can do well on their own when they are not inhibited by the gender and race boundaries in large companies.''

In the immigrant nomenclatura, ABCD stand for American Born Confused Desis, and FOB is Fresh off the Boat. The success of the Indian women entrepreneurs has provided inspiration to both ABCDs and FOBs. At a desi Silicon Valley networking event last month, the Sisters Patel wereflitting about trying to capture interest and raise capital for an online venture called Pardeshi.Com, an e-commerce portal for the Indian diaspora. ``Patels have become like Smiths and Jones to identified with the motel business. We wanna move out of that niche,'' says Tejal Patel, a first generation Indian-American fresh out of school.

Indian women are now chucking up history, philosophy, literature, and plain old home-making to go the tech route in droves. Indian women entrepreneurs are now burgeoning so rapidly that California now has a Indian Business and Professional Women's Association that promotes education leadership and self-development of Indian women through seminars and workshops. In New Jersey, a tech training schools actually sends out flyers to newly-wed Indians in the neighbourhood encouraging the women to enrol in schools teaching new tech skills.

In fact, the Indian tech magazine SiliconIndia itself is published by Mona Sharma, a East Coast entrepreneur who is herself moving to theValley to parlay the magazine into an e-commerce venture and go the dot com route. The idea of women making it big in the tech world is so routine among Indians that a little more than a year after marrying Chini Krishnan, the boyish chairman of Valicert, an internet security firm, his wife Rama Sundararajan is already talking of heading her own start-up. ``Of course, I want to be up there too. And there are enough inspirational stories already,'' says the Madurai woman, networking furiously at a desi tech gathering. If the current trend and evidence is anything to go by, no one would bet against it.

(One name in this story has been changed at the request of the interviewee)

(Next: The IIT-ian Titans: The Brain Curry Brigade).

Other stories of the series:

Unknown Indian no nerd, he's cyber bold

Where Integrated Chip means Indians, Chinese...

Indian with eye for fibre-optics climbs to rich list ...