Neha Narkhede is the latest entrant to the (India Infoline Limited) IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List 2022. The list featured a 37-year-old woman as the “youngest self-made female entrepreneur.”
Narkhede, an Indian-American with an estimated fortune of Rs 470 billion, is a co-founder of Confluent, a US-based streaming data technology company. She ranks 336th on the list.
Born in Pune, she moved to the US in 2006 and completed her Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. According to her LinkedIn profile, she took a software engineer position at LinkedIn where she worked for two years.
Here she was part of the team that built Apache Kafka, a distributed streaming platform used to capture data in motion.
In 2014, she launched Confluent with two LinkedIn colleagues to bring the software to more companies. The market capitalization of this software is her $7 billion. She served as Chief Technology and Product Officer until her 2020. She is currently a member of the Board of Directors.
Narkhede credits her parents with instilling a growth mindset in her.
“My parents did many things that still affect my life. First, they instilled in me the belief that anything is possible. It helped me develop a growth mindset that allowed me to approach things with the belief that I could learn something new over time, even if I didn’t have to. They taught me the value of education.Third, they exposed me to female role models.They weren’t in the tech industry, but they were women leaders in India and somehow It helped me shape who I wanted to be,” Narkhede told Forbes.
Reading about Indira Gandhi, Indra Nooyi and Kiran Bedi “is still the biggest influence on my career path,” said the 37-year-old.
In another CNBC interview, she said: This fostered a sense of empowerment within me and led me to believe that if someone like me could do this impossible, so could I.
Previously, she was named to the Forbes Homemade Women of America list in 2022, Top 50 Women in Technology Globally in 2018, and Innovators Under 35 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2017.
Currently, she is an investor and advisor to companies such as Gem, Block Party, Material Security, Abacus AI and Cortex Data.
She has a strong message for female engineers. Don’t stop,” she told Forbes.
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“Meet Neha Narkhede, Homemade Debuter of Hurun’s Richest Women List,” published July 29, 2022 by CNBC-TV18
“Technista Talk: Neha Narkhede – LinkedIn Employee To Confluent Boss,” Jumoke K Dada for Forbes, published Oct. 21, 2017.
CNBC’s Kathleen Elkins, published Oct. 23, 2019, “Multi-billion dollar company co-founder says lessons from her father had ‘single biggest impact’ on her career. say”
Edited by Rao Yoshida