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The Indian billionaire who started working in US on a visa: ‘I got a job in a cafe, built life from scratch’
Raj Sardana is the founder and CEO of Innova Solutions. Born in 1960 in Delhi, he rose from humble beginnings to become a billionaire.
A recent Forbes report on billionaire immigrants who got a start in the United States through the H-1B visa has only a handful of Indian names on the list. The report does, however, mention Raj Sardana, a man who moved to the US for higher education, started working on a visa, and eventually built a business that has today made him a billionaire.
Humble beginnings
Rajiv "Raj" Sardana is the founder and CEO of Innova Solutions. Born in 1960 in Delhi, he rose from humble beginnings to become a billionaire.
Sardana was born to Punjabi parents who moved to India during the partition of 1947. “My brother and I, along with our parents, lived for 20 years in dilapidated government housing in New Delhi with no heating or air conditioning, no refrigerator, no phone, no TV, and no automobile,” he said in an interview with Authority Magazine last year.
“Despite our humble beginnings, my parents instilled the values of relentless hard work and found a way to provide quality education to me and my brother.”
On moving to the United States
Raj Sardana moved to the US in 1981 to pursue a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, according to Forbes.
He says that when he relocated from India to the US, he had “maybe a hundred dollars” in his pocket. Sardana got a job in his college cafeteria to support himself through college.
“I started my life from scratch here,” he says. “I got a job at the cafeteria of Georgia Tech and supported myself through college.”
After graduation, he got an H-1 visa to work at Howmet Aerospace. The H-1 visa was the predecessor to the H-1B visa which allows skilled workers to live and work legally in the United States.
On building his own business
In 1987, Raj Sardana was working in a prestigious engineering position at Teledyne CAE, a company that manufactured engines for Tomahawk Missiles. However, in 1990, with the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia agreed to halt the production of new missiles, leading to the closure of this division. As a result, Sardana lost his job.
“I had just bought a house with a mortgage, had a six-month-old daughter, and my parents were also living with me. At that moment, I had no income to support my family. Somehow, I gathered enough courage to decide I would not work for corporate America anymore,” he told Authority magazine.
With the $25,000 he had managed to save, Sardana started his entrepreneurial journey. One decade later, his small business grew to become Innova Solutions. The IT services firm today has over 50,000 employees worldwide and its CEO, Raj Sardana, is worth a whopping $2 billion.
