Born in London and raised mostly in New Delhi, Jayshree Ullal is one of the wealthiest female executives in the United States. She earned her Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from San Francisco State University, then attended Santa Clara University, where she earned a master’s degree in engineering management.
After graduation, Ullal worked for Advanced Micro Devices in various engineering and strategy positions, eventually taking a position at Crescendo Communications, where she became the vice president of marketing and worked with the first generation of ethernet switching. In 1993, Cisco acquired Crescendo; Ullal took a position with Cisco, and quickly grew its switching business. From 1993 to 2000, she helped it flourish to a $5 billion operation.
Since 2008, Ullal has been Chief Executive Officer and President of Arista Networks. She currently owns approximately 5% of the computer networking firm’s stock. Six years after becoming the company’s CEO, Ullal brought Arista to its NYSE IPO.
Ullal has served on several boards of directors, including ZScaler (from 2008 to 2010), Arista (since 2008), and Snowflake (since 2020). She was named by Forbes as “one of the most influential people in the networking industry,” and was included in Barron’s World’s Best CEOs in 2018 as well as Fortune’s Top 20 Business Persons in 2019.
Ullal holds more than 30 years of experience in the networking industry, most of which was spent in high-level leadership roles. In 2020, she spoke with students in Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, inspiring them to follow their dreams. “Find your dream, and find what you’re not just good at but excellent at,” she advised. “Each and every one of you have a gift. And the gift may not necessarily be in the area you started with. You may have to evolve. So I ask you to keep trying, keep looking, and find that gift.”