101 Chai Chats

Monali is a technology executive who has worked at companies like Google, Twitter and Box. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Sekhar, and children Meena (her co-host) and Naveen. Monali was born and raised in Chicago and it's suburbs, which was not very racially diverse. Her parents came to the US from Maharashtra and Karnataka. So she grew up very much as a second-generation Indian-American trying to fit into a mainstream culture which was not very racially-diverse. She also spent 2 years studying in France, which gave her an opportunity to reflect on her Indian-American identity while living outside of it. She moved out to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1999 during the tech boom, and it felt a bit like culture shock to be surrounded by such a diverse population including so many Indians and Indian-Americans.