Indian and Iranian Professionals in the U.S. Are Similar and Different
Indians and Iranians in the U.S. have high levels of education, professional success, and income.
(Photo: Ali Ghodsi, co-founder Databricks.)
January 24, 2025
This week, Databricks, a data and artificial intelligence (AI) company, raised $10 billion in equity and $5 billion in debt. This latest funding round valued the San Francisco based company at $62 billion, up from $43 billion in the previous funding round in 2023.
"Organizations are modernizing their data and AI infrastructure because they recognize the immense potential of generative AI. Data intelligence is critical to both unlocking this potential and to helping enterprises reach their business goals," Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and chief executive of Databricks, said in a statement. The Iranian immigrant, who is an academic turned entrepreneur, is estimated to have a net worth of more than $1 billion.
Other Iranian founders of major U.S. technology companies include Adam Foroughi, co-founder of AppLovin, an application technology platform based in Palo Alto, California, with a market value of $120 billion. He has a net worth of $14 billion, according to Bloomberg. Foroughi earned a BA in business administration from the University of California Berkeley. Also, Pierre Omidyar, founder of online auction market eBay, which has a market value of $31 billion; and Arash Ferdowsi, who dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to co-found Dropbox, which has a $10 billion market value.
Iranian leaders of major U.S. technology companies include Sasan Goodarzi, chief executive of Intuit, which provides financial products for consumers and small businesses. It has a market value of $171 billion. Goodarzi earned an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School, Chicago. Also, Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of ride sharing service Uber, with a market value of $144 billion. He received his bachelor’s degree in engineering from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
There are numerous Iranians in the U.S. who have achieved major success in other businesses and as professionals and academics in science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine (STEM). Some Iranians in America refer to themselves as Persians, mainly due to tensions between the U.S. and Iran since Islamist theocrats took over Iran in 1979.
Iranians have higher levels of education, professional and business success, and significantly higher median household incomes, relative to the overall immigrant and native-born populations in the U.S.
Iranians place a high value on education and many immigrants are from families which have been educated for centuries. Engineers, doctors, scientists, and other professionals, especially those with advanced skills, are very eager to emigrate from Iran to the West.
In all these aspects, Iranians are very similar to Indian professionals in the U.S. Many of those with advanced degrees, from both ethnic groups, are employed by technology firms in the U.S.
Leading Indian founders of U.S. technology companies include Jay Chaudhry of Zscaler, which has a market value of $30 billion, and Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystems, who currently runs Khosla Ventures and has an estimated net worth of $10 billion. Indian CEOs include Satya Nadella of Microsoft, which has a market value of $3.3 trillion, and Sundar Pichai of Google parent Alphabet, with a market value $2.4 trillion.
At technology firms in the U.S., the total number of Indian founders, CEOs, and senior managers is far higher than Iranians. This reflects the fact that the number of Indians is eight-fold larger than Iranians; around five million Indians while there are 600,000 Iranians. Since 1979, there has been a sharp decline in the number of immigrants from Iran, mainly due to fewer Iranians being granted U.S. student visas.
The number of students from Iran in the U.S. rose from the 1950’s to the 1970’s. It peaked in the 1979-80 academic year at 53,000, when Iranians accounted for a fifth of all international students. In 2023-24, only about 4,000 Iranians were granted visas to study in the U.S. The decline is due to a series of visa restrictions: following the Islamist takeover of Iran in 1979; 911 terrorist attacks in the U.S. in 2001; and President Donald Trump’s 2017 travel ban on Iranians and those from some other Muslim countries.
In 1980-81, there were 9,250 students from India in the U.S., 3% of the international student population. By 1995-1996, there were 32,000 students from India while those from Iran fell to 2,600. So, in the 1980’s and 1990’s, the decline in Iranian students meant students from India faced fewer equally qualified competitors for the limited number of skilled work visas issued annually by the U.S. Indians though faced rising competition from Chinese students - their enrollment at U.S. universities rose from 3,000 in 1980-81 to 40,000 in 1995-96.
Since 2000-2001, the chances of students from India finding U.S. work visas has increasingly gotten worse due to a sharp increase in their number, as well as those from China.
In 2023-24, there were 234,000 students from India in the U.S. - nearly a third of the international total - mainly pursuing advanced STEM degrees. This was up from 133,000 in 2018-2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. So, over the past five years, there has been a 76% rise in the number of students from India competing for practical training and 85,000 H-1B skilled work visas issued by the U.S. each year.
In 2023-2024, there were 216,000 students from China. That year, the Chinese also secured 62,000 practical training work visas while the Indians received 98,000.
(Photo: Pierre Omidyar, founder eBay and major philanthropist.)
Given U.S. visa restrictions, Iranian professionals migrate mainly to Western Europe and Canada. In 2023, for instance, roughly 26,000 Iranians moved to Canada as students or permanent residents.
Some Iranians, who attain education and professional success in Western Europe or Canada, then move to study, work and found startups in the U.S. For instance, Ali Ghodsi earned an MBA from Mid-Sweden University, 2003, and a PhD from KTH/Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, 2006, in distributed computing. In 2009, he moved to the U.S. to pursue research at the University of California, Berkeley, as a visting scholar. He co-founded Databricks in 2013.
Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, was born in Paris. At age six, he moved to the U.S. with his family, after his physician father began his residency at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
There are examples of Indians and Iranians teaming up to set up technology businesses in the U.S. For instance, Amir Khosrowshahi co-founded Nervana with Naveen Rao, and Arjun Bansal. The builder of AI processors was acquired by Intel in 2016 reportedly for more than $400 million.
Amir Khosrowshahi is currently working on an undisclosed startup. Rao is a vice president at Databricks. Bansal is co-founder and CEO of Log10.io, a California-based startup, helping companies scale the accuracy of their AI-powered applications.
Khosrowshahi earned a PhD in computational neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley, 2011, and AM and AB degrees from Harvard. Rao earned a PhD in neuroscience from Brown University, 2011, and a BSEE in electrical engineering from Duke, 1997. Bansal also earned a earned a PhD in neuroscience from Brown University, 2010; and a BS in computer science from Caltech, California, 2005.
Pierre Omidyar earned a degree in computer science from Tufts University, Boston, 1988. In 2005, the founder of eBay and his wife Pam, also a Tufts graduate, donated $100 million to the university to launch a microfinance program, the largest financial gift in Tufts’ history. Earlier, the Omidyars donated $43 million to the university.
So far, foundations set up by the Omidyars have committed nearly $2 billion for philanthropic programs, including promoting free and quality journalism, protecting kids online, shaping inclusive social and education policies, as well as investing in for-profit businesses, including in India, that serve overlooked populations with much-needed products and services.
Since setting up in India in 2010, the Omidyar Network funded more than 120 startups. But at year-end 2024, the philanthropy shut down its operations in India. This was after it “came under the radar of India’s Central Bureau of Investigation…over alleged violation of the nation’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act that oversees a firm’s ability to receive overseas donations,” TechCrunch reported. Over the past decade, under laws passed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, more than 20,600 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in India have been barred from receiving foreign donations, according to a 2024 Amnesty International report.
The Omidyars have pledged to donate 99% of their estimated net worth of $12 billion to philanthropies. In a statement posted on the Giving Pledge site, Pierre and Pam Omidyar state, “We have more money than our family will ever need. There’s no need to hold onto it when it can be put to use today, to help solve some of the world’s most intractable problems.”
Iranian Omidyar’s philanthropic donation is larger than that of any Indian in the U.S. In fact, it far exceeds the total philanthropic donations made by all Indian billionaires and centi-millionaires in the U.S.