Shantanu Narayen, aged 45, is modest about his personal accomplishments - which include holding five patents - but passionate about technology, Silicon Valley and Adobe, the $3.6bn-a-year desktop software pioneer he now leads as chief executive.

Before joining Adobe in 1998, Mr Narayen, an electronics engineer from Hyderabad, India, who loves golf and his two sandy-coloured Labrador dogs, worked at Silicon Graphics and Apple, and co-founded Pictra, an early pioneer of digital photo-sharing over the internet.