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Were it not for the fact that the venture capitallist behind the lectern is petite and blond, the Network of Indian Professionals might just as well have been drawn from Bangalore as San Francisco. Hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs listen raptly as Ann Winblad, a partner at one of the city's premier firms, offers survival tips for Internet companies. When she's finished, Winblad is mobbed by young men--and a few women --eager to pitch their start-up ideas. She smoothly pronounces the names on their badges--Sanjay, Rajiv and Sharma--as she stacks their business cards. "This," says Winblad, "is where you find the up-and-comers."
It wasn't long ago that Indians in Silicon Valley were expected to be engineers and code jockeys, relegated to the server rooms of the hot new companies. Today they are just as likely to be CEOs, entrepreneurs and, increasingly, venture capitalists themselves. Indians started some of the Valley's most famous companies--Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems and Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail, for example--and, together with Chinese entrepreneurs, were responsible last year for 29 percent of the Valley's new start-ups, creating 60,000 jobs. This huge influx of hyperachieving techno-migrants, combined with a swelling Hispanic population, has--in just over a generation--transformed Silicon Valley into a "majority minority" microcosm of America's racial future.
In 1970 the population of Santa Clara County was 82 percent white; today the hub of Silicon Valley is 49 percent white, a quarter Hispanic, 23 percent Asian and only a fraction African-American. As the information economy spreads, these demographics will become familiar. "A lot of the U.S. is going to start looking more and more like Silicon Valley," says AnnaLee Saxenian, a professor of regional planning at UC, Berkeley. "These are the kinds of workers the knowledge economy demands." So far the transition from white majority to "no majority" has occurred with remarkably little strife. A 1998 poll by the San Jose Mercury News reported that 77 percent of the county's inhabitants thought race relations were "generally good."
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But this sunny statistic says more about the region's phenomenal wealth than about the colorblindness of its inhabitants. For all the talk of meritocracy, an ethnic hierarchy exists in Silicon Valley. At the top are entrepreneurs like Pehong Chen, who left Taiwan after college, earned his Ph.D. at Berkeley and worked his way through a series of start-ups. Today, at 42, he is CEO of Broadvision, a $3 billion e-commerce provider. Chen has 2,000 employees, 700 or 800 of whom, he says, have become millionaires. "We carry our weight," says Chen. "Why shouldn't we be represented at the top?"
In the minds of the high-tech community, prosperity and diversity are, in fact, inextricably linked. From Andrew Grove at Intel to Jerry Yang of Yahoo, Silicon Valley legend revolves around the exploits of immigrant superheroes. Less celebrated are the Hispanic janitors who tidy cubicles in the middle of the night for $8.74 an hour, or the Vietnamese and Cambodian women who assemble electronic components in digital sweatshops, often in appalling conditions. And the technology boom has yet to benefit large numbers of native-born residents--many black and Hispanic--who work dead-end service jobs and have never sent an e-mail or seen a stock option.
Highway 101 between San Jose and San Francisco is the San Andreas Fault of the digital divide. On one side is East Palo Alto, a predominantly black and Hispanic community where the median income is $18,000 a year. On the other, within walking distance, is money-drenched Palo Alto, median income $76,000. Like many East Palo Alto residents, Jenny Torres, 17, was working her way through high school as a "hasher" in a Stanford dining hall. Then, last summer, Mayor Sharifa Wilson helped Torres land a paid internship at Homestead.com, a nearby Web-design company. "When I tell my friends I'm working at a dot-com they're like, 'What?' " says Torres. "Almost everyone else I know does retail or food service."
The perception that it takes a Ph.D. to work in the tech sector is difficult for underprivileged young people to overcome. "The dirty little secret is that there are very good jobs at Internet companies that don't even require a college degree," says David Ellington, the CEO of Netnoir.com, a Web site for African-Americans. Two years ago Ellington helped start OpNet, a program that trains low-income youths for entry-level jobs in the multimedia industry, where they can earn $30,000 to $40,000 a year, plus benefits and options. But getting more blacks and Hispanics in the door isn't as hard as cracking the glass ceiling. When Ellington, a former entertainment lawyer with a degree from Georgetown, tried five years ago to raise venture capital for his black Internet company, he was turned down by dozens of Silicon Valley venture capitalists before a black-owned firm in Washington, D.C., put up $15 million. "If you've got a WASP CEO, a Jewish CFO and an Asian as CTO, your business plan can get funding on the back of a cocktail napkin," he says. "But the idea of empowering a black man with money is still threatening."
Gaining entree to the elite corporate boards that form the Valley's cozy social and financial networks is even tougher than raising millions. The real power is still in the boardroom, and high-tech boards, like those of the Fortune 500, are still overwhelmingly the province of white men. A survey earlier this year by Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition turned up only 5 blacks, 1 Hispanic, 4 Asians and 25 women among the 379 corporate officers at 50 of Silicon Valley's largest companies.
For immigrants, cultural habits can cut both ways. "There is still a perception that Chinese make good engineers, but not strong leaders," says Broadvision's Chen. "People from Confucian cultures are encouraged not to seem aggressive. That can be misunderstood here as an inability to communicate." For middle-class Indians, who grow up speaking English and are expected to train as engineers or physicians, cultural pressures often help. Ramesh Radhakrishnan, 37, a native of Bangalore, first studied physics in the seventh grade and calculus in the 10th. While his background was not unusual for the son of an upper-middle-class Indian family, he found he was better prepared than many American classmates when he enrolled for graduate work at the University of Virginia in 1984. Now an engineering supervisor at Cisco Systems, he and his wife, Ritu Saini, a marketing-intelligence specialist at Cisco, are living the tech immigrants' dream--high-paying jobs, a home in the hills, a young daughter and a huge network of Indian friends. "I wouldn't trade this for any other place," says Radhakrishnan. The Valley's challenge now is to apply all its diverse brainpower to create more opportunity for the sons and daughters of East Palo Alto to live the dream, too.
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