Silicon Valley innovator Padmasree Warrior is shifting industries to join the global race to develop electric cars. A technology influencer, she has a whopping 1.63 million Twitter followers, including President Barack Obama.
The woman in Silicon Valley with one of the most powerful names in tech just got more powerful.
Padmasree Warrior, who until September served as chief technology and strategy officer at Cisco Systems Inc., the world’s largest maker of data networking
systems, announced this week that she is the new
U.S. CEO and global chief development officer of
NextEV, a fast-rising Chinese electrical vehicle start-up that’s building an all-electric “supercar” to comp-
ete with Tesla.
Once hotly tipped to be the CEO of Cisco Systems, Warrior’s appointment this week as the U.S. boss of NextEV put to rest whispers circulating in
the Valley about her becoming the new CEO of Twitter.
The 55-year-old Indian-born executive, who has
spent her career at Motorola and Cisco, said she wanted to try a new field where her 30 years of technology
experience would still be relevant.
“Many verticals are about to go through mass-
ive change because of technology,” Warrior told reporters, further contending that no industry is as ripe
for disruption as transportation—all the more reason she was drawn to NextEV. The company, she
says, will “apply technology to solve fundamental
problems” like climate change and global pollution.
“I wanted to be part of creating something that is bigger and different,” added Warrior, who is agg-
ressively hiring in San Jose, California, where the
car maker has an 85,000-square-foot research and
development center. She says the firm is focused on
picking the best U.S. talent in software, artificial
intelligence, robotics, and data sciences.
Founded in 2014, NextEV has hired 400 employees to date and has research and design centers
in Shanghai, London, Hong Kong, Munich, and California. The Chinese car maker has already developed a
single-passenger race car that has competed in the
FIA Formula E races for electric vehicles. It also wants
to build the first truly mass-market electric car.
The Supercar
First, though, the company hopes to deliver what
it calls a “supercar,” a 1,360-horsepower speedster that
would compete against high-end sports cars.
“We’ll be targeting what we call a supercar with
very high performance targets, to be in production at
the end of 2016,” Warrior told Fast Company magazine.
“The intent with that car is primarily to check out
the performance, assess the technology, and reuse a lot
of that in the mass-market vehicle that will be following
it,” she added.
Warrior believes that “increasingly, it’s not about
knowing all the answers but asking the right questions
and figuring out how to get the right answer.”
“Our vision is not just to build an electric vehicle,
it’s really to think about the entire automotive industry
vertical and really rethink that industry asking, ‘If you
were to build an automotive company in the Internet
era, what would it look like?’ That’s the challenge that
we are setting ourselves up for,” said Warrior, who intends
to drive her cherry red Tesla Model S car till she
builds her own NextEV car.
Breaking Boundaries
After growing up in Vijayawada, Warrior got her
B.S. in chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of
Technology in New Delhi. She was one of five women
in an engineering cohort of 250 students. Warrior then
moved to the U.S. at age 22 to study for her Masters at
Cornell University. She has come a long way from her
start in the U.S. when she arrived at Cornell with $100
and a one-way ticket.
While planning for a doctorate (Warrior wanted to
be a professor), she took a job at a Motorola semiconductor
plant in Arizona, where she again was one of
only a few women working there at the time. Though
she planned to stay one year, she stuck around for
23. Rising through Motorola’s ranks, she became chief
technology officer in 2003 and made Fortune’s annual
Most Powerful Women rankings.
Warrior has gone on to smash formidable
barriers in Silicon Valley, but has noticed few women
rising through the ranks along with her. When asked
about the specific challenges women in leadership
roles face in the tech world, Warrior told a technology
conference that “Women have to overcome more
barriers. We don’t get as many passes as guys do.
A woman in engineering and STEM fields almost has
to outperform her male peers to get recognized. It’s
unfortunate, but that seems to be the norm.”
Warrior sounds hopeful about the future for
women in the tech sector. “As you see more women
leaders in the field, that will change.”
Warrior’s long and successful career in the
tech world has earned her widespread recognition,
including commendations from the Women in
Technology International Hall of Fame and Forbes
magazine, which placed her on the list of 15 Most
Powerful Women in Technology for 2013.
Women now receive six in 10 college degrees in
America so change is coming willy-nilly, and some
Indian women are leading the charge. Despite the
challenges, the annual reports of many U.S. companies
show Indian women are landing big jobs. Tech
innovator Padmasree Warrior, Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi,
finance high-flyer Sheila Hooda, high-tech innovator
Anita Goel, and former World Bank and McKinsey
& Co. consultant turned entrepreneur Rohini Dey
are emblematic of the plodding progress of women.
Warrior is on the boards of Gap, Box, and Microsoft.
And now she will join the NextEV board as well.
A wife and mother of one grown-up son, Warrior
mediates, paints, and dabbles in Haiku poetry to unwind.
She also gives her legions of Twitter followers
an insight into her world outside of the office, posting
novels she’s reading and images of her paintings.
Uttara Choudhury is editor (North America) for TV 18’s Firstpost
news site, contributor to Forbes India, and consulting editor for
BrainGain Magazine.