Sanjiv Sidhu, 41-year-old entrepreneur, co-creator and CEO of i2 Technologies, has been ranked in Forbes’ listing of the “America’s 400 richest people” for a few years running, most recently as a billionaire. Last year, Forbes ranked him the 202nd richest person in America.
Industry analysts also give high ratings to Sidhu. One analyst, who shall remain anonymous, thinks that what Sidhu lacks in charisma, he makes up for in business and scientific brawn. Another thinks Sidhu may not seem animated enough about his business but he actually has a fanatical passion for it. Joe Farley, of UBS Securities, believes Sidhu’s IQ is double that of most very smart people.

The former Indian sailing champion now captains a company poised on the brink of fully leveraging the brave new world of supply chain planning, the Internet and e-business. His decision to follow in the footstep of his father, an engineer, proved to be possibly the best decision Sidhu ever made. With a Masters degree in chemical engineering from the University of Oklahoma, Sidhu became fixed on the notion of being his own boss from the outset of his career, which began at Texas Instruments’ Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He used that rarefied atmosphere to hone his analytical skills and to gain a better understanding of industrial scheduling problems.

The consummate problem solver found a gaping need in the corporate world, and together with i2 Technologies co-founder Ken Sharma, sought to fulfill that need. It was in 1988 that Sidhu, with his pregnant wife doubling as his tech writer, founded i2 Technol-ogies. Within just a few years, the company became a dominant player in the scheduling and distribution market segment.

Although the company’s headquarters are in Dallas, Texas, it maintains offices in places as far flung as Brussels, Tokyo, Singapore, Toronto, Munich and Melbourne, to name a few. When the company went public in 1995, its 2,530,000 shares traded at $20 per share. Within two weeks that trading price soared to $54 on the Nasdaq. Sidhu retained 64.5 percent of the company, and at the time he was valued at $716 million. Even with his stock and personal fortune fluctuating slightly with market trends, Sidhu remains an eminently successful self-made man.