Veni, Vidi, Contuli: Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella and Trump's $100,000 H-1B mistake

You can call this first one a superhero story. In 2014, Microsoft was on the verge of irrelevance. Bill Gates' company, which ushered the world into the digital age with DOS and Windows, had missed the mobile wave, lagged in cloud computing, and was a non-player in AI. Some analysts even suggested it be sold off in pieces, a sort of garage sale for legacy software.

Fast forward to July 30, 2025, and far from having a 'Kodak moment' of oblivion, Microsoft briefly becomes the world's first-ever $4 trillion company. Not Apple. Not Google. Not even the market magnet Nvidia. It was Microsoft, whose valuation was fueled by its massive and successful bets on artificial intelligence and cloud computing. So, what do you think happened in 2014 that led to this company having one of the most dramatic plot twists of the capitalist age? On February 4, 2014, the white CEO responsible for missing the tech waves stepped down for a brown Indian immigrant from Hyderabad: Satya Nadella.

Nadella isn't an anomaly; he is not even the most visible symbol of a community that has made America great over and over again: That’d perhaps be Sundar Pichai. Instead, you can call his achievements the tip of a multi-trillion-dollar American iceberg.

Consider some of the leaders of today's American tech landscape: Sundar Pichai's Alphabet (Google’s parent) has a market cap of over $3 trillion; Shantanu Narayen took Adobe to over $155 billion; Arvind Krishna sits atop IBM's $250 billion; and Neal Mohan heads YouTube, nested within Alphabet's valuation. And I'm not even talking about Vimal Kapur of Honeywell ($134 Billion), Raj Subramaniam of FedEx ($55 billion), or the most recent Indian member of the CEO club: Srini Gopalan of T-Mobile ($270 billion), or founders of tech startups taking Silicon Valley by storm like Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas or Luma AI's Amit Jain. The names in this paragraph alone represent a combined market capitalisation of over $8 trillion: nearly double India’s GDP, just under one-third of America’s.

Read the last paragraph over Led Zeppelin’s rousing beats in Immigrant Song with lyrics: "On we sweep with threshing oar, Our only goal will be the western shore". I cannot talk about other immigrant communities in the US because I’ve known no other, but the Indian community – many of them my friends from school and college did not follow the mantra of conquerors as the Zepplin song is about, i.e. Veni, Vidi, Vici. Nah! The mantra my friends there in America, and those like Nadella, Pichai, Narayen, etc., follow is: Veni, Vidi, Contuli – I came, I saw, I contributed.

Yet, the Trump administration has imposed a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas. This will not just be a massive blow to America's big tech, but will affect Indians the most because over 70% of H-1B visa holders in the US are Indians. The administration's logic, as echoed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, is to "stop this nonsense of letting people come to America on visas for free. Only valuable people are welcome." I understand the sentiment: America for Americans, and the government wants to encourage companies to hire American workers. But wanting only the fully formed, pre-packaged 'valuable person', ready to contribute from day one to America without any further investment, now that is where the problem lies. Let me explain.

You see, this "value" is not manufactured in a vacuum, but is cultivated in the grind and culture of daily life. Becoming 'valuable' in any field is a lifelong process that requires immersion in a culture of innovation, access to cutting-edge ideas and projects, and mentorship from the greatest minds within a world-class corporate ethos.

Much as I love my country, I am honest enough to admit we do not have any of it. We have a few oasis around of that culture, yes. But most of India's corporate world is precisely the opposite of what you need to truly make a 'valuable', world-class executive. So much so that I can imagine and tell you of an alternate reality of what would have happened if these Indian-American CEOs had never left India.

Satya Nadella might be managing a cloud migration project for the Ministry of Fisheries, which has been delayed indefinitely due to a missing file. Sundar Pichai could be leading the "Maps for Cows" initiative at a local firm touted as aatmanirbhar, but using foreign software and cloud infrastructure. Shantanu Narayen might be designing wedding invitation templates for Shaadi.com Premium while the project approval for his startup idea gathered dust in some ministry somewhere.

Their potential would have been siphoned away, as it has been of millions in India, by the bureaucratic indifference and infrastructural chaos that remains a stubborn reality of daily life in India.

I have coined a term for this phenomenon, which describes what happens to talent in India: the "Locust Effect." All of you must have seen the cute, lovely grasshopper. It is usually a solitary, introverted little nibbler. However, under specific conditions of environmental stress, when their population density spikes in a particular area, a switch flips inside each of them. A surge of serotonin, the "swarming hormone", rewires their brains. They transform from shy loners into gregarious swarms, their colour shifts from green/brown to yellow/red/black, wings elongate for long-distance flight, and their appetite explodes as they go from picky eaters to indiscriminate devourers. Their breeding synchronises, and they lay eggs in massive clusters. In short, this is the greatest villain arc of nature as your garden-variety hopper transforms into a biblical menace.

Replace grasshopper with talented Indians. If they manage to figure out the escape velocity to reach greener pastures like the USA, they grow into the productive souls, part of the ecosystem, who help the world. But inside India, as we constantly clash and bump into each other in a dense competitive environment amidst a shortage of jobs and resources, we become jealous and bitter, we turn locusts and develop what is famously called the 'crab mentality' where we work more to pull others down than plot our own rise. You really think such a culture would create 'valuable', world-class executives?

(Those delusional Indians gunning for my blood on reading this, please remember that after independence, which was in 1947, the only Indians who have won Nobel prizes in scientific fields—Har Gobind Khorana, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan—all earned them while working in the United States.)

Another problem is that this visa fee fundamentally misjudges the economic equation. Don't listen to me, but lend an ear to economists' warning that such policies could lead to "brain drain" and "hurt US economic growth". And how smart is it to focus on a one-time fee of $100,000 while being blind to the lifetime of value an immigrant creates?

Is $100,000 today really more than the trillions in market capitalisation, taxes, and jobs that leaders like Nadella and Pichai generate over their decades-long careers? Isn't this the perfect example of knowing the price of everything, but the value of nothing?

So here's what the current US administration needs to understand: valuable people are not made in countries like India, or continents like Africa—at least not the kind of value that equips you to run a company with as much market cap as the GDP of the country you come from. Value is milked when enthusiastic seeds meet fertile ground, as it did for Nadella, Pichai, Narayen, and hundreds of thousands of others like them who may not be heading trillion-dollar or billion-dollar corporations, but are using their talents to contribute to the US economy and, by default, to the world's. When you stop such hard-working people by artificial barriers, you are not just slamming the door on dreams or on the hopes of actualisation of these talented grasshoppers, but on the future of American innovation itself.

As I write this, I think of the dozens of friends who left for the US, Australia, Europe decades ago (I was born and raised in Gujarat where immigrating to the US is as common an ambition as becoming a doctor or engineer is to the rest of India) and who now run companies, or head departments, or run their own stores and lead fulfilling careers, and have the time and resource for hobbies and families. They built a beautiful life and contributed not just to their adopted society, but also to those back home.

I also can't help but think of the regret of those of us who stayed, so trapped in a "dog-eat-dog" culture that it's become part of our DNA.

Most of all, I think of the next Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, or Indra Nooyi (each of whom held an H-1B visa in the last millennium), brilliant students full of ideas that could change the world one day. Under this new rule their applications would be deemed costly and their potential to create trillions for America, will either lie dormant, or worse would be wasted fighting it out for mid-level VP roles at Infosys, Wipro, TCS, HCL, etc., stuck in traffic on Outer Ring Road, or attending mandatory chai-and-charts meetings where innovation means adding a new column to an Excel sheet.

America isn't just cutting its nose to spite its face; it's choosing to be blind, and in doing so, it is sacrificing its brightest future for the illusion of present security. The message is clear: "Only valuable people allowed." But by this definition, the most valuable asset of all—potential—is, ironically, no longer welcome.

[Article by Satyen K Bordoloi. Views expressed are their own]