In Their Footsteps: International Student Success Stories

International student-founded or led companies represent over $5T of shareholder value.

Elon Musk

CEO at Tesla, Founder of SpaceX, Co-Founder of Neuralink

Entrepreneur and business magnate Elon Reeve Musk was raised in Pretoria, South Africa and attended the University of Pennsylvania where he received a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Physics. His business career began in 1995, when he decided to drop out of Stanford University to found web software company Zip2 (acquired by Compaq in 1999). He went on to found several successful companies including X.com (sold to eBay in 2002), SpaceX, and Neuralink. He joined Tesla in 2004 and became CEO in 2008. Under Musk’s tenure, the company is one of few US companies to exceed $1T in total market capitalization.

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Indra Nooyi

Former CEO at PepsiCo

Born in Madras, India, Indra Nooyi moved to the US in 1978 to attend the Yale School of Management where she earned a Masters degree in Public and Private Management. Before joining PepsiCo in 1994, Indra Nooyi worked at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Motorola, and Asea Brown Boveri. She served as PepsiCo’s CEO from 2006 - 2018 and helped PepsiCo become one of the largest consumer brands in the world.

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Companies Hiring International Students with Business Majors

Find out which US companies are willing to hire international students majoring in Finance, Accounting, Marketing and Consulting.

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Sundar Pichai

CEO at Alphabet Inc. (and its subsidiary, Google)

Born in Madurai, India, Sundar Pichair first came to the US on a student visa to complete his M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University in 1995. He went on to obtain his M.B.A. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. Sundar first joined Google in 2004, after a brief stint at powerhouse management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He was appointed as CEO of Google in 2015 and is largely responsible for Google Chrome and Google Drive.

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Satya Nadella

CEO at Microsoft

Born in Hyderabad, India, Satya Nadella started his US journey on a student visa and completed his M.S. in Computer Science at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1990. After a short stint at Sun Microsystems, he joined Microsoft in 1992. He completed his M.B.A. at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 1997 and became CEO of Microsoft after 17 years in 2014. He has led major projects that include the company's move to cloud computing and the development of one of the largest cloud infrastructure platforms in the world.

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Jayshree Ullal

CEO at Arista Networks

Although she was born in London, Jayshree Ullal was raised in New Delhi, India. Jayshere received her B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from San Francisco State University in 1991 and obtained a M.S. in Engineering Management from Santa Clara University. She began her career at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Crescendo Communications (acquired by Cisco Systems in 1993). In 2008, she joined Arista Networks as CEO and took the company public in 2014; Arista is a dominant player in the computer networking industry and commands a total market capitalization of over $37B.

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Patrick Collison and John Collison

Co-Founders of Stripe

Patrick and John, also known as the ‘Stripe Brothers’, were born in Dromineer, Ireland. Patrick studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while John attended Harvard University, before they started Shuppa (sold to Live Current Media in 2007). In 2010, the Collison brothers co-founded Stripe, a financial services and SaaS company that processes over $350B each year in online payments. They grew the company to become a leader in the complex payment processing industry and were recognized as the world’s first self-made billionaires in 2016.

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Neerja Sethi

Co-Founder of Syntel (acquired by ATOS)

Born in India, Neerja completed her Master’s degree at Oakland University in Oakland, Michigan and co-founded Syntel in 1980 with her husband Bharat Desai. The couple grew Syntel to become a global leader in the information technology consulting and outsourcing space with over $1B of annual revenue. In 2018, the company was acquired by French giant ATOS for an estimated $3.4B.