“Men give me some credit for genius. All the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. I explore it in all its bearings. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort which I make is what the people call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labour and thought.” —Alexander Hamilton
We have written abut Arista Network (ANET) on a number of occasions starting in 2023. Our most recent piece after the Q2 Results can be found here.
The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday had a readable article about the company and its CEO.
Wall Street surge makes billionaire CEO one of the richest women in the world- Sydney Morning Herald
In the artificial intelligence gold rush, even pick-and-shovel companies such as Arista Networks are seeing their fortunes swell. The hardware provider’s shares have more than doubled since April, reaching an all-time high last week.
Arista’s run has made its chief executive, Jayshree Ullal, 64, one of the richest women in the world with a $US6.4 billion ($9.8 billion) fortune and put her among only a handful of non-founder executives to achieve that level of wealth, Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows. She owns a 3 per cent stake in the company through trusts for herself, her children and a niece and nephew.
The rise in Arista’s stock has also pushed co-founder and chief technology officer Ken Duda, 54, to a $US1.2 billion net worth, Bloomberg’s wealth list shows, joining fellow co-founders Andy Bechtolsheim, 69, and David Cheriton, 74, in that exclusive club.
A spokesperson for California-based Arista declined to comment.
Another runaway year could boost Ullal into the ranks of the world’s 500 richest people after the networking company reported second-quarter earnings on Tuesday that beat analysts’ estimates and raised its full-year revenue growth guidance.
“The company is very much built by engineers for engineers,” Ullal said in a 2020 interview hosted by Notre Dame University. “You may think, obviously that’s how it should be. But you’d be surprised how people lose track of that.”
Networking network
Duda, Bechtolsheim and Cheriton worked together at Granite Systems, a startup co-founded by Cheriton, a Stanford University professor, and Bechtolsheim, who had founded Sun Microsystems before leaving in the 1990s. A software engineer known for his technical acumen, Duda studied computer science and electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford.
In 1996, Granite Systems was acquired for $US220 million by Cisco Systems, where Ullal was working.
Born in London, Ullal moved to India when she was five. Her dad, a physicist, worked for India’s Education Ministry, where he helped establish the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. She went to an all-girls Catholic school, Convent of Jesus and Mary New Delhi, before her dad’s job posting meant a move to San Francisco.
Soon she found herself one of two girls in a male-dominated engineering class. She graduated from San Francisco State University in 1981 with a degree in electrical engineering and later earned a master’s from Santa Clara University in engineering management. Her career took her through the burgeoning semiconductor industry, including stops at Advanced Micro Devices and Fairchild Semiconductor.
She later moved to Crescendo Communications, where she was vice president of marketing when the firm was bought by Cisco in 1993. At Cisco, she rose through the ranks and grew its switching business to more than $US5 billion in annual sales.
“Probably my greatest lesson I’ve learnt from that is how you can still remain an entrepreneur at heart and grow that entrepreneurial journey in a corporate executive role,” Ullal said in the Notre Dame interview.
Self-funded
In 2008, she left Cisco and joined Arista, which was then a small startup team of fewer than 30 people working out of the basement of a law firm.
Bechtolsheim, Cheriton and Duda had started the company in 2004, with the latter two spending more than $US100 million to self-fund it. Cheriton now has an $US11.9 billion fortune, while Bechtolsheim has a net worth of $US30.4 billion, Bloomberg’s wealth index shows.
In the early days, Arista focused on networking tools for high-frequency traders. Ullal’s first big client was Lehman Brothers, which went bankrupt soon afterwards in what she describes as an “ominous start” to her tenure.
The growth of its networking switch business eventually meant it was challenging other firms for market share, which resulted in Cisco suing Arista in 2014. The parties settled just as they were going to trial four years later with Arista paying Cisco $US400 million.
Since then, Arista’s market share has doubled as industry demand for better networking gear continues to climb, with Microsoft and Meta among its biggest customers. Second-quarter revenue rose 30 per cent from a year earlier to $US2.2 billion, the firm reported on Tuesday after the market close, while adjusted earnings rose 38 per cent to 73 cents a share.
“Sometimes, people ask me, ‘Hey Ken, back when you co-founded Arista, did you expect you guys would succeed like this?’” Duda wrote last year in a blogpost celebrating the company’s 20th anniversary. “The answer is, not in my wildest dreams.”
12/08/2025