Indian Americans Divya Nag and Amit Agarwal have made it to the top 10 on the Fast Company’s 100 “Most Creative People in Business” list. The annual list, in its eighth year dating back to 2009, was released May 16.
Nag was ranked No. 2 on the list, just behind composer, lyricist and performer Lin-Manuel Miranda. She was selected “for moving Apple into the doctor’s office,” according to the Fast Company piece.
She leads the team at Apple that created ResearchKit, an open-source developer toolbox that piggybacked on the company’s HealthKit framework — which allows users to store and share health data — to allow doctors and researchers to create apps that make it easy to participate in medical research, Fast Company explained.
“Through Apple’s new CareKit tools, doctors can automatically alert outpatients when it’s time to take their medications or exercise — while patients can reciprocate with continual updates on their condition,” Fast Company wrote. “Doctors and hospitals are already using CareKit apps to provide better care, staying in touch with post-surgery patients, and there are countless applications for monitoring diabetes, mental health, pregnancy and more,” it added.
Nag dropped out of Stanford and founded Stem Cell Theranostics, a company dedicated toward revolutionizing the drug discovery process. Additionally, she founded StartX Med in 2012 and served as the chief product officer and head of network management and R&D at StartX.
Coming in at No. 10 on the list is Agarwal, who made the list “for extending Amazon’s reach, one vendor at a time,” Fast Company said. Agarwal has been a staple at Amazon since 1999. The IIT Kanpur and Stanford University graduate started with the e-commerce company as a software developer. Throughout his career he has held various roles, including managing director of the Bangalore-based development center, shadow and technical adviser to the CEO, vice president of international expansion and his current role of vice president and country manager at Amazon India.
“In less than three years, Agarwal grew the division to become competitive with homegrown rivals Flipkart and Snapdeal, and is using the country’s underdeveloped logistics and payment infrastructure to his advantage,” Fast Company wrote. He has also established many “India first” innovations, it added.
San Francisco-based Kakul Srivastava was slotted in at No. 25 on Fast Company’s list. The publication said she earned a spot “for seeing the people behind the code.” The MIT and U.C. Berkeley graduate serves as the vice president of product management at GitHub, as well as on the Cure Violence advisory board. Previously, she served as CEO at Project Sublime, product manager at Adobe Systems and chief product officer at WeWork, as well as executive positions with Yahoo, Tiny Speck Inc., Tomfoolery Inc. and Flikr.
“Historically, GitHub users have been engineers working together on open-source projects, but Srivastava is rethinking its capabilities for the masses, in an era when everyone from farmers to animators is learning to program,” Fast Company wrote. Among her additions to the company are word processor-style editing tools and easier ways for members to help improve their code.
Yoga guru Baba Ramdev, who founded Haridwar, India-based Patanjali Ayurved in 2006, was No. 27 on the publication’s most creative list. Fast Company slotted him in the top 30 “for disrupting India’s $49 billion consumer packaged goods market.”
Patanjali Ayurved makes many products, including spices, soaps and cosmetics. Ramdev has helped expand the brand’s product line and “is making global firms like Procter & Gamble and Unilever squirm,” it said.
At No. 65 on the Most Creative People in Business list was Mountain View, Calif.-based Confluent co-founder and chief technology officer Neha Narkhede. She made the list “for teaching businesses to read Kafka.”
Among the companies who rely on software co-developed by Narkhede are Netflix and CA Technologies. The six-year-old Apache Kafka technology, which funnels data from disparate sources of information — web analytics, sales data and social media — into a single stream that employees can use to build or enhance their projects, has become “so integral to the tech world that Silicon Valley engineers brandish Kafka expertise on their resumes,” Fast Company said.