Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO of Arista Networks, had an early inkling she was bound for a career in technology.
Students in her high school — the Covenant of Jesus and Mary in Delhi, India — took an aptitude test to determine their placement into either a humanities program or science.
"Obviously, I came out on the science side," Ullal, now 63, told IBD. A tech career was an unlikely choice for women at the time. But her father "was so proud of my physics and math capabilities," she said. Even Ullal's mom approved when it became clear that she "couldn't do traditional needlework."
Make An Impact Like Jayshree Ullal
It turns out that needlework's loss is Arista Networks' gain. Ullal joined the company in 2008 after a long and distinguished career in the technology industry. She led the private company public in 2014.
Financial figures are available starting in 2011. Every year since then — with a single hiccup during the 2020 Covid year — the company enjoyed double-digit increases in revenue.
Revenue jumped from $139.8 million in 2011 to $5.8 billion in 2023. Over that same period, net income jumped from $34 million to $2.1 billion.
While success made her career choices obvious in retrospect, it wasn't necessarily a slam dunk at the time.
Tap Into Your Roots
Jayshree Ullal was born in London. Her father worked for the Indian government there. Though a trained physicist, he worked in the area of education. His job? Improve ties between Indian and British universities.
He returned to India when Jayshree was four. And because a quality education was paramount to him, he enrolled his Hindu daughter in a Catholic school.
"It's where I learned to speak when spoken to," she said. Of the 200 students in her all-female class, only 50 went into the science program and, of those, only two went into engineering. It wasn't surprising, since "leaning in was still unusual for women then," she said.
But the school "pushed me hard" and the staff encouraged her, she said. Her dad was reassigned to the U.S. That family move allowed Ullal to earn a B.S. in electrical engineering from San Francisco State followed by a Master's in engineering management.
Launch Your Career
Her career began at Fairchild and then Advanced Micro Devices, where she had an epiphany that led her into a management role. "What I was doing was building, testing and diagnosing chips. I was a good engineer, but I didn't believe I was an excellent engineer," she said.
A crisis opened opportunity. "One of our customers had a big problem with one of our chips," she said. "There was a memory connection issue. Some loose bonding in the packages. I had to do a lot of troubleshooting. It was one of the first times I had to speak to a customer directly."
Working through the issues showed Ullal another part of the business. "You know how it can be speaking to (customers) directly when they are in a crisis. The customer can be quite annoyed or irritated," she said. "I remember feeling a deep fulfillment and satisfaction that I was solving a problem for a customer in a way I never could as an engineer."
The experience drew her more into the customer and management side of the business. "I transferred from a role in pure chip design into what is called product planning, where you get to define the next generation for your customers," she said. "And that's how I got into management. Initially, it wasn't going up the ladder vertically. It was more horizontal."
It took a minute for Ullal to feel comfortable in her new role. "When you start moving into marketing, planning and leadership roles, there are many more shades of gray," she said. "Initially that ambiguity bothered me. But for me, being trained with an engineering mind, for me it was (the certainty) of ones and zeros."
Find Your Mentors
But there was no ambiguity on the part of her bosses. "They saw some potential in me. I think what they saw in me — in addition to my engineering ability — was the clarity of my thought. And the strategic nature of how I think ahead," she said.
Jobs with Ungermann-Bass and Crescendo Communications, the latter her first startup, followed. "You cannot experience Silicon Valley without trying one of those," she said.
Cisco bought Crescendo in 1993. Ullal spent the next 15 years with Cisco, rising to senior vice president. During this period, she oversaw 20 mergers and acquisitions. She also managed billions of dollars of increased revenue in areas she supervised.
Make Technology Mission-Critical
She ascribes part of her success to her ability to take raw technology "and make it (vital) for our customers."
"I'm so proud of the fact that the Catalyst (switching business) product line is probably a $15 billion product line over the years," she said. "And when I talk to customers they still speak highly of it. It was launched in 1999 and probably intended to be there until 2009. Many of them still have it in their network 20 years later. That makes me proud."
The ability to create and build products like Catalyst is not, Ullal contends, a management skill. If you are making decisions based on recent data. it's probably too late to build something great.
Rather than emphasizing "incremental features that drive short-term revenue ... I like to think of what we're going to be doing in one to three years, or even three to five, because in those time frames things can change a lot," Ullal said.
"The ability to look further and build something of value the customer may not even have thought of yet is something I really cherish and like to do over and over again," she said.
Find New Opportunities
Ullal's ability to look into the future in part prompted Andy Bechtolsheim, Arista's founder and chief architect, to woo her to his firm. Ullal announced she planned to leave Cisco in May 2008. She was looking for a fresh start, an entrepreneurial opportunity.
"I was looking at battery and solar technologies, cleantech and a lot of other things," she said.
Bechtolsheim knew Ullal since her days at AMD. And he worked with her at Cisco when she acquired his previous startup, Granite Systems, in 1996. He didn't wait to get started, attending her farewell party to get the ball rolling.
"What I particularly admire about Jayshree is that her leadership style worked equally well when Arista was a tiny startup as when it grew to the much larger company is it today," he said.
Ken Duda, a founder and chief technology officer at the company, points to Ullal's skill at "picking a key account, mapping out the customer's decision process, and getting everything connected in a highly complex technical sale so we get the right information in front of the right people at the right time and win."
Her energy, he adds, inspires "others to do their best work and to never settle for mediocrity."
Focus On Your Team ... And Get Results
Asked what advice she'd give someone just starting in the business now, she breaks it into three guiding principles. "The first is start (your job search) with ... people who really know how you can contribute to a company," she said.
"The second is have tenacity and passion. Make sure it's not just about you, but about the team and the people you work with. And the third is, of course, you can do all that, but without focusing on the results the first two don't matter. So I would say, be with friends, lead with passion and get results."
Jayshree Ullal's Keys
- Led Arista Network's IPO and near perfect record of increases in sales and earnings as CEO since October 2008.
- Overcame: Ignorance about her background.
- Lesson: "I think people are more aware now. But I feel you can always dwell on your differences, but I prefer to celebrate them."
