Ex-PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi worked from midnight until 5 a.m. as a receptionist to pay for her Yale degree—and she says ‘respect went up’ because of it

Indra Nooyi came to Yale from India in the late 1970s and worked midnight‑to‑5 a.m. dorm receptionist shifts to pay her way through school.
She rose through companies like Johnson & Johnson and PepsiCo to become PepsiCo CEO (2006–2018), driving big growth and earning repeated recognition as a top business leader.
Nooyi emphasizes leadership as a skill learned over time—study leaders, learn from their mistakes—and many other top CEOs also started in entry‑level jobs.