Vivek Wadhwa is an Indian-American technology entrepreneur and academic. He is Distinguished Fellow & Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon's School of Engineering at Silicon Valley and Distinguished Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. He is also author of books Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain—and How to Fight Back, Driver in the Driverless Car, Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology, and Immigrant Exodus.
Early life and education
Wadhwa was born in Delhi, India. He graduated from the University of Canberra in 1974 with a Bachelor of Arts in Computing Studies, and from New York University in 1986 with an MBA.
Career
At Credit Suisse First Boston, Wadhwa led the development of a computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool to develop client-server model software. First Boston spent $150 million on these development efforts. The CASE technology was spun off by First Boston into Seer Technologies in 1990 with an investment of $20 million by IBM. At Seer, Wadhwa was executive VP and chief technology officer. Seer developed tools to build client-server systems. Seer Technologies filed for an IPO in May 1995.
In 1997, Wadhwa founded Relativity Technologies, a company in Raleigh, North Carolina which developed tools for modernizing legacy COBOL programs. He left the company in 2004, and it was sold to Micro Focus in January, 2009.
After a heart attack, Wadhwa shifted his focus to academic research. Wadhwa is an executive-in-residence/adjunct professor at the Masters of Engineering Management Program and Director of Research at the Center for Research Commercialization at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering; and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Halle Institute for Global Learning, at Emory University. He has been a Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School's Labor and Worklife Program and a visiting professor at the School of Information, at the University of California, Berkeley. He writes a regular column for The Washington Post, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the American Society of Engineering Education's Prism Magazine, and Forbes, and has written for Foreign Policy. He is also the author of the 2012 non-fiction book The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent.
Wadhwa serves as an advisor to Malaysia on advancing innovation, science and technology through the Global Science and Innovation Advisory Council (GSIAC). He also advises Russia on how to create innovation ecosystems through his participation in the New York Academy of Sciences.
Columnist and pundit
Wadhwa writes a regular column for The Washington Post, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the American Society for Engineering Education's Prism Magazine, Forbes, Foreign Policy, and The Wall Street Journal. Wadhwa has frequently argued that because of the low numbers of women technology CEOs, there is a problem with the system. In September 2014, Wadhwa released Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology, a book he co-authored with Farai Chideya and including contributions from hundreds of women. The book presented research about women in technology and argued that "it's not enough for company executives to make donations or be advisors to groups like Girls Who Code. They must take action and be the good example – just as Facebook did before its IPO. In September 2015 Wadhwa was recognized by Financial Times as "one of ten men worth emulating in his support of women." The article states, "Some feel it is wrong to focus on the work that men — rather than women — do to help women fulfill their potential at work. (Vivek Wadhwa on our list has been on the sharp end of such criticism). We disagree, and hope that recognising this varied group will engage and embolden other champions."