Jayshree Ullal

Cisco made billions off her brain and now she’s running the $153B company taking their market share.

When Jayshree Ullal was 16, her family moved from Delhi to San Francisco.

She went from an all-girls Catholic school to a nearly all-male engineering program in California.

She got her degree in electrical engineering, followed it with a master’s in engineering management, and jumped straight into the chip world.

At AMD, she built high-speed memory for IBM and Hitachi.

Then one of their chips failed in the field.

She was pulled in to troubleshoot and for the first time, she had to face a furious customer.

Jayshree loved it.

That was the moment she realized her real skill: translating tech into strategy.

She shifted into product planning, joined a networking company called Ungermann-Bass, and in 1992 became VP of marketing at a startup called Crescendo.

They were working on a new thing: 100 Mbps Ethernet over copper.

One year later, Cisco acquired them.

And it pulled Jayshree into what would become a 15-year run at one of the most powerful tech companies in the world.

She built Cisco’s Catalyst switching division and turned it into a $15B product line.

By the time she left Cisco in 2008, she was Senior VP overseeing $10B in revenue, 20 M&As, and had helped grow the company from $1B to $40B.

She had everything: power, money, prestige.

And she walked away.

She took a break. Looked at cleantech. Batteries. Solar.

Then Andy Bechtolsheim, the Sun Microsystems cofounder and one of Google’s first investors, showed up with a pitch.

He had a startup.

30 engineers. No revenue. No customers.

He wanted her to run it.

Jayshree said yes.

She joined Arista Networks in October 2008.

They signed their first customer within weeks: Lehman Brothers.

One month later, Lehman collapsed.

Still, she stayed the course.

She built for the hyperscalers: Meta, Microsoft, AWS.

She knew they’d need faster, more scalable networks to power the cloud.

And she knew Cisco was too bloated to get there first.

In 2014, she took Arista public.

By 2024, revenue hit $7B.

Today, Arista builds the high-speed networking that makes LLMs and massive data centers even possible.

Jayshree has been named EY Entrepreneur of the Year.

One of Barron’s World’s Best CEOs.

Silicon Valley’s Power 100. Twice.

And is recognized as one of America’s richest self-made women, with an estimated net worth of $3.9B.