Ex-PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi worked midnight shifts as a Yale receptionist to pay tuition

Indra Nooyi, the former chief executive officer of PepsiCo, the soft drink and snack giant, arrived in the United States in the late 1970s as a graduate student at Yale University. She was a self-described misfit from India who spent her nights working from midnight until 5 a.m. As a dormitory receptionist.

She did this to pay for her degree before heading straight to class each morning, according to Fortune. Paying for an Ivy League education was not easy, with annual tuition equivalent to about $20,000 in today dollars while her parents told her they could not help financially.

When she landed consulting and investment banking jobs, people looked at her and said those are brainiacs, and respect went up purely because of her hard work. Today, she sits on the board of Amazon, Honeywell, which makes industrial and software technology, and Philips, the health technology company.

Her net worth is estimated at roughly $340 million according to Forbes. After graduating from Yale in 1980, she worked at Johnson & Johnson, Boston Consulting Group, and Motorola before landing at PepsiCo in 1994 and becoming chief financial officer by 2001 and chief executive officer by 2006.

During her tenure lasting until 2018, sales grew 80%, proving her naysayers wrong when women led only about 2% of Fortune 500 companies. Leadership is a lifelong process like training for the Olympics, she noted. Even midnight receptionist shifts can build the kind of work ethic that carries someone all the way to the corner office.

Photo: Andy Mettler, World Economic Forum, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, AI-edited