You probably haven't heard of him, but Sumer Johal, a person I had the privilege of working under, was destined to become one of the biggest Indian rags-to-riches success stories ever.Born in Punjab in a poor farmer family, he lost his father when very young and through sheer hard work and talent made it big in the USA where he became a close friend of Bob Burnett, a co-founder VP of Cisco Systems, and other power brokers, at a young age of about 30.
Sumer Singh Johal didn't attend IIT but I am going to include his success story here because it might shed light over other success stories we hear about so often.
As I mentioned earlier, he didn't go to IIT. Rather he attended MIT - the real one - in Cambridge, MA. He did his undergraduate studies there on a full academic shcolarship and went on to get his masters in computer science from there as well. Extremely bright in studies, in his freshman year he won MIT's prestigious Robotics competition, and his MS thesis was selected as one of the best.
Unlike many toppers, he was active in extra-curricular activities too. In 1991 he started a Bhangra Club at MIT, and through his excellent leadership and dedication, led his team to many national awards.
Afer graduation from MIT, he joined Analog Devices where very soon he started an Operations Research Department. However, he became restless there and soon left Analog to start his pretigious firm PSG Consultancy whose client list boosted of names like AT∧T, Nortel and such heavyweights.
I met him at a small but elite technology startup in Berkeley, California named Xamplify. He was the chief technology officer there. Bob Burnett, who had retired after making hundreds of millions of dollars from his Cisco Systems venture, had come back as president of this company. He and Sumer spent most of their working hours together. He took Sumer Johal to lots of CEO's and other influential leaders of the business community.
After a few months, Burnett had to leave for some personal reasons, and he was replaced by Dr. Robert Oliver, a former professor at UC berkeley and a former chairman of Fair Isaac Companies. Fair Isaac is well known for its FICO credit scores, used widely in personal and business world for credit ratings. If your FICO score is bad, you won't be able to rent an apartment, get a car loan, get a home mortgage and so on. He too became very fond of Sumer Johal and they spent most of their working time together discussing lots of brilliant stuff.
I could go on but to cut it short will mention that the company's investors and advisors included professors from Stanford and berkeley and businesspeople like former president of PeopleSoft, director of Goldman Sachs, heir to Levi's Jeans family and such notable people.
While some toppers are not good at people-skills, Sumer was an exception. Almost everybody at Xamplify loved him. My colleagues and bosses relied on him to guide the company to a large-size takeover by some big bank or so. They listened to every word he said. If timing would have been right the company could have been sold for a very large amount, making him rich in the process, and then he would have been one of the role models millions of Indian kids try to emulate.
Unfortunately, the stock market was in bad shape making it difficult for Xamplify to be sold. Moreover, while Sumer was extremely popular with white guys in the company, at least one person in the company - I - found that he was a lying scumbag. He paid me significantly less than what a fresh college graduate majoring in liberal arts made in the company, made me work 60 hours plus a week while Caucasian colleague was in the offcie like 20 hours, and humiliated and harassmed me whenever he got the chance. I complained to a government agency and the company decided to get rid of him to reduce its liability.
Thanks to many search engines and archive.org, it has become quite easy to check one's background. I did so. I found that Sumer apparently attended St. John's in Chandigarh, a boarding school for rich, from 12 years. Frankly, i thought he was an idiot and didn't understand even simple concepts in statistics and finance even though he was meeting chiefs of big financial institutions. More about him somewhere else on the web. You know how to find him. He was just a crook.;)
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