Professionals Speak: Buck Gee and Vish Mishra – Silicon Valley and our Asian-American Advantage
Buck Gee, a retired VP/GM of Cisco Systems and a board member of Ascend, and Vish Mishra, a venture director of Clearstone Venture Partners and president of TiE Silicon Valley, provided great insights on the Asian-American advantage in Silicon Valley. In an article the duo wrote for The Mercury News, they delved into the growing Asian-American workforce (50 percent of job-holders in Silicon Valley). One outcome of their analysis was that despite this impressive achievement, only about 12 percent and 8 percent of board members are of Asian descent.
According to a 2011 survey published by the Center for Work-Life Policy, it is not because Asian-Americans do not aspire to executive roles. On the contrary, Asian-Americans were actually more ambitious than their peers in seeking leadership roles.
“Asian-American leaders have always occupied a prominent place in the legend of Silicon Valley, with people such as Vinod Khosla co-founding Sun Microsystems to create the technical workstation market, Koichi Nishimura growing Solectron into a global manufacturing powerhouse, and Albert Yu leading Intel’s microprocessors to market leadership. Today, we have nVidia’s Jen-Hsun Huang, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen and SanDisk’s Sanjay Mehrotra as successful CEOs.”
Read the full article here.