A serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley with four startups under his belt, Gupta has just sold his latest SaaS company, Apptio, to IBM. Life has come full circle for Gupta, given that Big Blue was where he began his career three decades ago.
Sunny Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of Apptio, is having a homecoming of sorts. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) company made headlines on June 26 after the technology giant IBM announced that it had inked a definitive agreement to acquire the firm for a whopping $4.6 billion. The deal will mark the return of Gupta to IBM, where he began his career in 1992.
Gupta, 53, a successful serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur with four startups to his credit, has come a long way. He was born in Chandigarh — his father was an IAS officer who served as the secretary of education in the Indian government, while his mother hailed from a family of entrepreneurs.
From an early age — when he was seven or eight — he found the world of entrepreneurship intriguing, and felt it would allow him to control his own destiny. And indeed, he went on to do that. In a 2013 interview with The New York Times, Gupta noted that his two brothers and he were all running their own successful companies.
With just $2,000 and a plane ticket, he moved to the US in 1989 to pursue a higher education course at the University of South Carolina. “I felt like I needed to go to the US because everybody said, ‘You can start from nothing and create something.’ India was not that way at the time, though it has changed a lot now,” he told NYT back then.
Despite getting a partial scholarship, Gupta had to work odd jobs to get by. He washed dishes and even worked as a mover, but ultimately got a full scholarship thanks to hitting the books hard. Gupta then interned for the president of the university.
