Note: Former Microsoft and AWS exec Harini Gokul serves on the Medina (Wash.) City Council.

Guest Opinion: Saturday, Aug. 15, was India’s 80th Independence Day. I marked it at the Indian Consulate in Seattle, at a celebration hosted by Consul General Prakash Gupta. The Indian American diaspora attended in full force, from community members to tech CEOs.

The event was open to the public, and the line to get in stretched over a block, a powerful, visible display of India’s economic success and soft power, right here in the Pacific Northwest.

But the more interesting story is not the celebration itself. It is who showed up to celebrate, and why.

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson issued a statewide proclamation declaring Aug. 15 “India Day.” The mayors of Seattle, Bellevue, Kent, and SeaTac each signed their own municipal declarations, joined by the King County Council, which represents 39 cities across the region. U.S. Reps. Suzan DelBene and Marilyn Strickland sent official messages marking the occasion.

In person, state Sen. Tina Orwall was joined by the mayors of Redmond and Kent, alongside council members from cities including Redmond, Bothell, DuPont, and Medina.

What’s driving this goodwill?  There are now 5.2 million Indian Americans in the U.S., about 1.6% of the population, according to the latest Census Bureau figures.

In King County alone, more than 100,000 residents are of Indian origin; statewide, the figure is roughly 200,000. In cities like Redmond and Kent, the Indian American community makes up a meaningful share of the tax base, the school population, and the local business community.

This is one of the reasons elected officials are showing up. Because their Indian American communities are central to their growth story, a constituency whose economic and civic weight has become too significant to ignore.

This momentum has been building in the region for decades. What has changed is the altitude. The same talent pool that once filled engineering organizations is now filling CEO offices, board seats, and, in smaller but growing numbers, elected office.

Business success is turning into civic and cultural presence. Many of our Indian American leaders started in tech. Satya Nadella has run Microsoft since 2014. Anand Eswaran has led Veeam since 2021. Srini Gopalan became CEO of T-Mobile in November 2025.

And increasingly, this leadership is branching out. You see the impact in venture capital, through investors like the late S. “Soma” Somasegar, who moved from Microsoft to Madrona; and in culture, through the Seattle Orcas cricket franchise, launched in 2023 by an investor group including Soma, Satya, Sanjay Parthasarathy, Samir Bodas, and Ashok Krishnamurthi to grow the sport nationally.

With the change in demographics, civic influence is increasing as well. Redmond, Kent, and Bothell all elected Indian-origin council members in the most recent cycle. I represent the trend myself, now serving in my second term as a city council member for Medina, Wash.

My story is an all too familiar one. I came to the U.S. as an engineer two decades ago and grew up alongside this region’s hyperscalers, first at Microsoft, then Amazon. Today I sit on corporate boards and work across private equity and venture, and I have the honor to represent the city I live in. I am one small example of how we are scaling our impact and giving back to our adopted home.

Eighty years after India’s independence, the story of its diaspora in our state has moved well past individual success stories. It’s measurable now, at scale, in the leadership of some of the most important companies in the state, and in its growing influence across culture, economics, and politics.

This is why everyone from the governor’s office to city halls across Washington has decided this partnership is worth investing in and worth showing up for.

The satellites rolling off the line in Redmond, Wash., are paying for Elon Musk’s AI ambitions — and he says the company’s satellite internet business is only getting started.

SpaceX’s Starlink connectivity division posted $1.7 billion in operating income for the second quarter, maintaining its status as the company’s only profitable business, according to numbers released Tuesday afternoon as part of its inaugural earnings report as a public company.

The AI division, built around the Grok model and the X social media and technology platform, lost $1.3 billion while spending $15.8 billion on capital projects. That capital spending amounted to more than three times Starlink’s quarterly revenue of $4.3 billion (up 66%).

Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, used the first SpaceX earnings call to make the case that investors are badly underestimating Starlink.

He said a new generation of satellites could increase Starlink revenue tenfold, and the network could deliver “a majority of the world’s internet” in less than 10 years. Musk said AI and robots will drive demand for bandwidth far beyond anything people generate on their own.

“I think Starlink is the only thing that can actually service that bandwidth,” he said.

Amazon is getting in the race, building its own satellite internet network at a factory in nearby Kirkland, Wash. Its Leo constellation has “close to 400 satellites in orbit, enough to begin initial satellite internet service this year,” CEO Andy Jassy told analysts last week.

Overall, SpaceX topped Wall Street expectations with revenue of $7.8 billion for the quarter, up 92% from $4.1 billion a year earlier. It also narrowed its net loss to $541 million from $1 billion.

SpaceX shares closed at $125.33, up 9.4% on the day, then fell nearly 5% in after-hours trading following the report, apparently on concerns about the company’s capital spending.

SpaceX builds its Starlink satellites at a Seattle-area factory that produced about 70 a week from December 2025 to April 2026, according to the company’s IPO filing. The output has put roughly 9,600 Starlink satellites in orbit, about 75% of all active maneuverable satellites circling the planet.

For the second quarter, SpaceX reported 12 million Starlink subscribers, double the number a year earlier and an increase of 1.7 million from the first quarter. The revenue increase in the Starlink division (officially known as “Connectivity”) was driven by a 108% jump in enterprise and government business, which now accounts for more than 40% of the segment’s sales.

The subscriber total was just under the 12.19 million Wall Street had projected, but the segment’s revenue exceeded expectations by about $460 million, more than any other part of the company.

Starlink now brings in $66 a month per subscriber, down from $85 a year ago as it expands overseas and adds cheaper plans. The good news for SpaceX: the figure stopped falling, holding flat from the first quarter, despite the company’s warning to IPO investors that it would keep sliding.

Wenxin Fang was 14 years old when he realized he was fed up with fighting with a flimsy piece of plastic in math class.

As an eighth grader at Evergreen Middle School in Redmond, Wash., Fang kept bumping into the limits of standard classroom protractors — the cheap, clear tools generations of students have used to measure and plot angles. Frustrated by how often he had to realign the plastic arc just to mark a single line, he started sketching an alternative in his notebook.

Two and a half years and seven design iterations later, the incoming Tesla STEM High School junior is launching the ZeroPivot Protractor, a sleek, precision-machined aluminum hardware project aiming to drag an overlooked classroom staple into the modern era.

“I shouldn’t be fighting with a piece of plastic to draw an angle,” said Fang, now 17, during a call from China this week where he was meeting with suppliers ahead of production of his tool.

Fang launched a Kickstarter campaign on July 26 to fund the initial production run of the ZeroPivot. The campaign hit its initial target within 48 hours and has raised more than $2,200 from dozens of early backers.

Priced at $19, the ZeroPivot is positioned as a durable, high-precision upgrade over standard $3 plastic models. The funding will cover tooling costs and help manufacture the custom-machined aluminum components through HKAA Industrial, a supplier Fang vetted and partnered with during a visit to Shenzhen.

To make the tool work, Fang abandoned the traditional semi-circular design in favor of a guide-rail system made from anodized aluminum — a material choice he insisted on despite the higher production costs.

Unlike a standard protractor, which requires users to mark an angle’s vertex and rays in separate steps, the ZeroPivot features an adjustable sliding mechanism that allows users to plot and draw precise angles in a single fluid sweep.

“I went down this path of product design, trying to come up with something that’s small, that’s almost simplistic … that is able to improve the lives of people in tiny ways through good design,” Fang said.

Fang didn’t just keep his ideas trapped in his notebook. After coming up with the initial sketches, he brought them to his middle school engineering teacher, who encouraged him to build an actual prototype rather than treat it as a fleeting thought.

When he transitioned to high school, that mentorship expanded into a full support structure. A trio of teachers helped him turn his hobby into a legitimate consumer hardware launch:

• Steven Bonomo, an engineering and product design teacher with a background working on Microsoft’s Surface Laptop line, guided Fang through user testing, ergonomics, and physical product design.
• Andrew Christensen, who has a background in law, walked him through the corporate, operational, and legal logistics of starting his company, Bonae Artis LLC.
• Karen Schaeffer, a graphic design teacher, helped him refine the brand identity and the final visual aesthetics of the product and its packaging.

That guidance proved essential as Fang spent the past year user-testing prototypes in class on himself and his classmates, refining the tool’s feel and mechanics in real classroom conditions.

Balancing the demands of a hardware startup with high school homework requires an intense level of discipline — and plenty of late nights.

“It’s a ton of work, that’s just the reality of it,” Fang said. “If you’re pushing a project by yourself, there’s not an external deadline there. What you have to do is set deadlines for yourself and say, ‘Hey, this iteration needs to get out by Sunday.’ I do late nights pretty often just to get something in on time.”

For Fang, the ZeroPivot is just the starting point for a career he has been prepping for since childhood. His earliest memory of designing anything was at age 9 during Chinese Lunar New Year, when he used Lego bricks and superglue to create a custom ceiling hook to help his grandparents hang decorative lanterns.

Now aiming for a college degree and future career in product design and mechanical engineering, Fang sees the protractor project as proof of what simple, physical problem-solving can accomplish.

“That was kind of when I first realized, hey, I could make something so simple, and I could have somebody else use it, and it could be really nice for them,” Fang said.

With the Kickstarter campaign already funded, Fang is focused on executing the manufacturing run smoothly in China and delivering the finished ZeroPivot protractors to backers by his estimated February fulfillment target.

While he isn’t yet ready to reinvent the ruler or big pink eraser, Fang does envision creating more consumer hardware tools down the road. But his immediate motivation remains remarkably simple.

“I’m definitely focused on getting this through to fulfillment and getting this in people’s hands,” Fang said. “I think that is the most satisfying part of doing products — getting to see people using them.”