Jay Vijayan

Jay (Jayaprakash) Vijayan is an entrepreneur, engineer, inventor and investor. He is the Founder and CEO of a startup that is currently operating in stealth mode. He is the former Chief Information Officer (CIO) for Tesla Motors. He was reporting to Elon Musk, Chairman, Product Architect and CEO of Tesla Motors all through his tenure at Tesla. Prior to which, Vijayan was with VMware and Oracle. Sought for his leadership in building simple scalable software for businesses, Vijayan also advises several technology startups around the globe.

Vijayan is the son of K. Vijayan and V. Umadevi. Born into a Tamil family, Vijayan was raised in Chennai (formerly, Madras), in Tamil Nadu, India. He was educated at AVM Matriculation, Avichi Higher Secondary Schools and later received a Bachelor of Science and then Master of Science degrees from the University of Madras in Chennai, India.

In early 2016, Vijayan founded a startup which is currently operating in stealth mode.

Formerly, Vijayan was the CIO of Tesla Motors for over 4 years, reporting to Elon Musk, Chairman, Product Architect and CEO of Tesla Motors. Vijayan lead the development, implementation and Transformation of Tesla's Digital strategy, Information Systems and Infrastructure platform during the period of critical growth and ramp-up phase of the company. During his time with Tesla, Vijayan and his team built several systems including Tesla's e-Commerce, ERP, Service and Logistics systems that are considered to be simple, agile, flexible and custom fit to Tesla's needs and he also built a global technology organization to support it. Vijayan is best known for building an integrated end-to-end home grown e-Commerce/ERP system for Tesla, the first minimum viable version of which he and his team built in four months.

Previous to joining Tesla, from 2007 to 2012, Vijayan was with VMWare in the roles of Director of Applications Development and Senior Director of Business Applications, Information Technology. In his roles at VMware, Vijayan lead the technical implementation of VMware’s ERP, CRM systems and development of several business critical applications during the company’s high growth period. From 2000 to 2007, he was with Oracle in different product development teams developing and managing ERP product development.

Vijayan has extensive experience in developing and implementing scalable ERP / CRM, SaaS, web applications and building big-data and cloud platforms. He has several industry recognized technology certifications and patent for tech inventions.

Before coming to the United States, Vijayan worked in Singapore, Muscat, Oman developing software for two different companies and prior to that he helped run a computer software and education company in Chennai, India.

Vijayan received the Tamil American Pioneer – Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Engineering/Science by the Federation of Tamil Sangams of North American in July, 2014. He was part of the Executive Advisory Council for AT&T, TiE Charter Member and the CIO Advisory Council for Microsoft.

Vijayan lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children.