Sanjay Parthasarathy, a former Microsoft leader who is among the notable tech execs that have ownership stakes in Seattle’s new professional cricket team, has been passionate about the sport since he played it as a kid in India.
He may end up being known as a key figure in making the second-most popular sport in the world a hit in the U.S., too.
As the Seattle Orcas open their third season of Major League Cricket play on Saturday, Parthasarathy joined a new episode of “Desi Roots & Routes,” a podcast produced by Seattle University’s Roundglass India Center, to talk about everything from his history with the sport and how to play it, to how he hopes it can catch on in America.
The episode touches on parallels between the rise of Indian technology workers and immigration reform in the U.S., as well as Parthasarathy’s role in helping Microsoft take off in India.
Author and journalist Greg Shaw, who has written about cricket and the Orcas, said that when immigration opened up in the 1990s with the H-1B visa, and the personal computer was taking off, Silicon Valley and Seattle saw an influx of Indian developers and programmers at places like Microsoft and elsewhere.
“With them came their passion and love for cricket,” Shaw said on the podcast.
Shaw is bullish that Parthasarathy can help spur cricket’s popularity in the U.S.
“What Sanjay has always been so great at is, at Microsoft, taking complicated software development and making it accessible to the masses,” Shaw said. “And I think he’s going to do that with Seattle Orcas and with Major League Cricket.”
Parthasarathy is part of the deep tech community backing that has helped get the Orcas off the ground. Other notable owners include: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Madrona Venture Group Managing Director S. Soma Somasegar; Icertis co-founder and CEO Samir Bodas; and GreatPoint Ventures managing partner Ashok Krishnamurthi.
Parthasarathy, who was previously profiled by GeekWire, spent 19 years at Microsoft. Five years after joining the company, he told his managers in 1995 that he wanted to go to India and help Microsoft scale. The idea was born out of his return to the country six years earlier, during a summer away from MIT, and his understanding that India was poised to make a mark in the IT industry.
With no experience selling anything in his life, he said he was given the OK and was named Microsoft’s regional director for South Asia.
Two years later, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates made his first trip to India.
“His trip was bigger than Michael Jackson,” Parthasarathy said. “We did 40 different meetings, and we coined the phrase ‘India can be a software superpower.’ It caught everybody’s imagination in India. Three years after that was the Y2K challenge, which really was the beginning of the expansion of the Indian software industry. It already existed, we just happened to have lit a match at the right time.”
The Seattle Orcas open the 2025 season on Saturday in a match against the Washington Freedom in Oakland, Calif., continuing alongside five other teams on the journey to grow the sport in the U.S. Learn more about watch parties in the Seattle area.
Listen to the “Desi Roots & Routes” episode below:
