Jayshree Ullal and Neerja Sethi have made in into the latest Forbes List, “America’s Richest Self-Made Women” released on July 11, 2018. In the 4th edition of the annual list by Forbes magazine, these 60 women have a record combined net worth of $71 billion.
Forbes said that net worth of these 60 women is up 15% from $61.5 billion in 2017 and that they have shattered ceilings and scaled new heights, making fortunes in everything from genetic testing to slimming shapewear. The minimum net worth to make Forbes’ fourth annual ranking of these top women jumped 23 percent to a record $320 million. Twenty-four of these women are billionaires, another record, up from 18 last year.
Indian-origin technology executives Ullal is ranked 18th in the list with a net worth of $1.3 billion and Sethi is ranked 21st with a net worth of $1 billion. Ullal, the 57-year-old president and chief executive officer at computer networking firm Arista Networks. The head of Arista since 2008, Ullal, of Saratoga, Calif., owns about 5 percent of the company’s stock, some of which is earmarked for her two children, niece and nephew, Forbes said. The company in 2017 recorded revenues of $1.6 billion.
Arista and Cisco, Ullal’s former employer, have been locked in a multi-year legal battle over alleged patent infringement, which Arista denies. Ullal, the Ernst & Young U.S. Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015 (see India-West article here), earned a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from San Francisco State University and a master’s in engineering management from Santa Clara University.
Sethi, the vice president of IT consulting and outsourcing company Syntel, which she co-founded with her husband Bharat Desai in 1980 in their Troy, Mich., apartment, came in at No. 21 on the list. The 63-year-old executive who resides in Fisher Island, Fla., has a net worth of $1 billion. She started out with an initial investment of a mere $2,000 which resulted in first-year sales of $30,000.
In 2017, Syntel, which now employs roughly 23,000 individuals globally – 80 percent of whom are in India – made $924 million in revenues. Sethi earned a bachelor’s in mathematics and an M.B.A. in operations research from Delhi University, and a master’s in computer science from Oakland University.
Topping the Forbes list was Diane Hendricks, the co-founder of ABC Supply, with $4.9 billion. Marian Ilitch of Little Caeser’s fortune ($4.3 billion), Judy Faulkner in the health IT industry ($3.5 billion), Meg Whitman of eBay ($3.3 billion) and Johnelle Hunt of the trucking industry ($3.2 billion) round out the top 5. Other notable individuals in the top 10 include Oprah Winfrey (No. 6, $3.1 billion) and Doris Fisher of the Gap (No. 8, $2.8 billion).
