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Personally, I don't think it can be understated how impactful Zoom's IPO is. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Eric Yuan is the first Asian billionaire created from
by hydroflask 8y ago
Personally, I don't think it can be understated how impactful Zoom's IPO is. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Eric Yuan is the first Asian billionaire created from running an American tech company. Others have come close (Justin Kan/Twitch, Tony Hsiehs/Zappos), but Eric is the first.
And I think this really marks the start of an increase in Asian/Indian-American entrepreneurs making waves in the upcoming decades. For all the talk about overrepresentation of Asian-Americans in tech, most are limited to technical/individual contributor/engineering roles. Very little Asian representation in management/executive roles, but it's quickly rising. Andrew Chen, Connie Chan @ a16z. Jessica Lee @ Sequoia.
I'm Asian-American, grew up in SV (currently in college). An explanation for the pattern I described above is that my and most of friend's parents are immigrants from Asia. Often went to the top universities in their country, and came to US for graduate school, then work for the big tech companies.
And so for them, they weren't able to take any risk - they were there to settle down and start a family. But the new generation of Asian-Americans go to these top colleges, and are able to have the ambition to do entrepreneurship. I'm extremely excited and optimistic to see more AA representation in startups and driving real-world impact.
- dba7dba 8y agoI think founders of Wang Laboratories deserve such recognition. Sure they were not billionaires but not many were back few decades ago.
- hdpq 8y agoThey were billionaires of their time.
- tootie 8y agoJerry Yang? Charles Wang?
- WillPostForFood 8y agoBen Silbermann
- kerng 8y agoYahoo IPO'd 23 years ago, gained 154% on first day of trading. Jerry Yang has probably long been a billionaire (20+ years). Yahoo stock peaked around $120 during dotcom boom. Inital price at IPO was $13.
- hydroflask 8y agoThanks for letting me know. I had no idea, he's actually from the same city my parents are from...
- gdilla 8y agoPriscilla Chan, too, if indirectly.
- friedman23 8y agoNVIDIA?
- ralph84 8y agoSome others not mentioned yet: - Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai of Marvell - Koguan Leo and Thai Lee of SHI - Jayshree Ullal of Arista - David Sun and John Tu of Kingston - Min Kao of Garmin - Romesh Wadhwani of STG - Vinod Khosla of Sun/KPCB/Khosla Ventures - Niraj Shah of Wayfair - Ram Shriram of Netscape/Amazon/Google
- dajohnson89 8y agoLisa Su
- bluedino 8y agoHe's not a billionaire but Steve Chen was a co-founder of YouTube.
- jasonshen 8y agoWould definitely bet Steve Chen is near billionaire status now if he joined Google 2006 and stayed for a bunch of years. Google stock and stock market generally has done very well in that time period (minus 2009-10)
- ETHisso2017 8y agoIt will be interesting to see if the FBIs recent attention to Chinese VCs and entrepreneurs will impact this trend.
- devy 8y agoRe: Asian billionaire created from running an American tech company You also forgot Jensen Huang of Nvidia. He co-founded Nvidia 1993 (perhaps you weren't born at the time), been CEO and running Nvidia ever since, with a current net worth of $3.6 billion. And there are older generation Asian-American CEOs running big tech companies and reach billionaire status since 1950s! - Wang Laboratories CEO An Wang [1] - Computer Associates International, Inc. former CEO Charles B. Wang [2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Wang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Wang [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Wang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Wang