Umang Gupta

After graduating, he joined IBM as a computer sales representative.[4] After working seven years at IBM, in 1981 Umang Gupta joined Oracle Corporation as their 17th employee. He was credited with writing the company's first business plan in 1981 and was eventually promoted to vice president of the company's microcomputer products division. He remained in the role until his departure from the company in 1984.[11]

He was the founder and chief executive of Gupta Technologies, a client/server database and tools company, from 1984 to 1996, where he helped to usher in the era of client server computing with the first SQL database server and application development tools for PC networks.[12] In the 1980s, products of Gupta Technologies included interfaces for programming custom applications and tools for programmers with a background in Cobol, dBase, or Visual Basic.[13] Gupta was the first executive who had worked under Larry Ellison to start his own company.[8] Gupta Technologies was the first Indian-run enterprise software company to go public on Nasdaq.[8] Gupta sold the company in 1997.[13]

Gupta was chairman and chief executive officer of Keynote Systems from December 1997.[13] He oversaw the company as it went public in 1999.[14] Gupta was able to negotiate the merger between Keynote and Vividence in 2004 after meeting Vividence CEO Peter Watkins at a poker game.[13] It was sold to private equity company Thoma Bravo in August 2013.[15][16][17]

Gupta served as an advisor and investor in William Draper’s project to establish a venture capital fund for India in 1994.[18] He served on the board of Mosaix, a company that developed call-center software, from 1997 to 1999, before it was sold to Lucent Technologies.[19]

After selling Keynote Systems, Gupta dedicated his efforts to education for young children, founding SeaShells Education. One of his main initiatives was Reading Racer.[20][21] Gupta developed the Reading Racer app with a team including Carnegie Mellon graduates Melanie Lam and Rodrigo Cano and also launched a foundation to continue support for Reading Racer.[22] Gupta also began investing in educational technology companies such as Front Row Education.[23]

In 2000, Gupta was honored with the Shreyas Mavanoor Foundation Award[4] for Civic Leadership and Philanthropy. Gupta served on the board of the Peninsula Community Foundation, California, which later merged with another foundation to form the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the largest community foundation in the United States. He along with his wife Ruth were donors to, and served as board members of PARCA, a non-profit organization in the San Francisco Bay Area devoted to the needs of the developmentally disabled and their families,[24] and helped to found Raji House, a respite home for the developmentally disabled, located in Burlingame, California. Gupta also had an avid interest in history and served as Chairman of the Board and on the President’s Advisory Committee of the San Mateo County Historical Association (SMCHA); SMCHA operated the San Mateo County History Museum, where he and his wife helped sponsor the "Immigrants Gallery", also known as the “Land of Opportunity” Exhibit, a permanent exhibition to honor the contributions of immigrants to San Mateo County.[25][26] Gupta and his wife Ruth also contributed $500,000 for the renovation of the San Mateo County History Museum, which was acknowledged as the biggest private contribution received by the museum.[9]

Gupta was also a co-founder of the IIT Kanpur Foundation[5] and served as Global Board Chairman of PanIIT,[5] the alumni organization of over 200,000 alumni of the Indian Institutes of Technology. Bagla is credited with drafting the constitution of the Global PanIIT Association, which is used in the association's chapters around the world.[27] He participated as an angel investor and advisor to various Silicon Valley technology companies.[7]

Gupta was also a guest contributor to The New York Times.[28]