Nikesh Arora

His first marriage to Kiran, with whom he has a daughter, ended in divorce.

In 2014, he married entrepreneur Ayesha Thapar in a lavish wedding.

Despite being a globe-trotter, he is an Indian at heart and loves Indian food. He plays golf in his leisure time and is a big fan of cricket.

Nikesh Arora was born on February 9, 1968, in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India. The son of an Indian Air Force officer, he completed his schooling from The Air Force School in Delhi. He has one sister.

He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi with a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering in 1989. He took up a job with Wipro following his graduation but quit it soon in order to pursue his higher education in the United States.

He joined the Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, from where he earned an MBA.

In 1992, Nikesh Arora joined Fidelity Investments as an analyst. He simultaneously joined a master's program in finance at the Boston College where he attended classes at night. The hardworking young man topped his class and completed his CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) in 1995.

Over the ensuing years he rose through the ranks at Fidelity and held top finance and technology management portfolios, eventually becoming the Vice President, Finance, in Fidelity Technologies.

He left Fidelity to join Putnam Investments but he did not stay for long there. Soon he joined Deutsche Telekom.

In 2000, he started T-Motion PLC, a company which provided certain value added services for the newly launched 3G services of Deutsche Telekom. Within two years T-Motion was merged into Deutsche Telekom as a part of T-Mobile where Arora worked in various capacities including as a member of the board.

Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, he was looking to start another company in 2004 when he learnt of a small company that was looking for someone to manage its European business. The company was Google, which had just recently gone public.

Having joined Google when it was still a small company, Nikesh Arora played a key role in managing the company’s sales and in expanding its revenues. As a top sales executive, he not only opened up new advertising markets worldwide, but also explored newer advertizing venues and managed Google’s network of a million websites to which it syndicates display ads.

During his stint at SoftBank, he credited with investing more than $2 billion in India across the startup sector. Some of his major investments were in Snapdeal, Housing.com and Oyo Rooms.