Sundar Pichai
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Contents |
Early life
Source: The Times of India
1. The Times of India, Aug 12 2015, Vinayashree Jagadeesh
2. The Times of India, Aug 12 2015, B Sivakumar & Vinayashree Jagadeesh
Magic memory, humble origins, stunning rise
Born and raised in Chennai, Sundar studied in institutions which had modest reputations and facilities at best. Neither Jawahar Vidyalaya at Ashok Nagar (where he did Class X) or Vana Vani Matriculation School on the leafy IIT-Madras campus (where he completed his class XII) are in the elite league. He grew up in a conservative, middleclass Iyengar family in south India, which did not even use a telephone for a long time. The rare outings involved the family of four squeezing together on a scooter.
The teachers now have a hard time placing Sundar who completed his 10th in 1987. “We tend to remember the naughty ones always,“ quipped his economics teacher Uma Prabhakaran, recalling Pichai as a calm boy with good manners.
A well-behaved, academically sound, unassuming student -that's how teachers at Sundar Pichai's alma mater Jawahar Vidyalaya Senior Secondary School in Ashok Nagar, Chennai, described the 41-year-old newly-appointed CEO of Google. “We're proud and elated at the news,“ said school principal Alice Jeevan who taught English when Pichai was a student. “We'll always feel proud of our children's achievements.“ A S Kumar, another school alumni who handles the Jawahar Vidyalaya alumni page, defined Pichai as a `bookish' person. “One of our schoolmates remembers how he fought for every mark, especially in the science paper. If he made a mis take, he'd try to understand where he went wrong and correct it,“ he said.
The pride and elation remains evident in Vana Vani matriculation higher secondary school on the IIT Madras campus, where Pichai completed his schooling.
But he and his brother Srinivasan, also an IIT alumnus, did leave a mark in academics. Sundar, in particular, is also remembered for his phenomenal memory .
“Years ago when Sundar was in school, he came to our house in Mayiladuthurai once. During a conversation, a family friend gave me his phone number. I asked my wife to write it down but she forgot. After some months, I asked Sundar about the number, and he reeled it out in stantly,“ recalled his mother's brother S Raman, a retired bank manager who lives in Chennai.
Their parents Regunatha Pichai and Lakshmi Pichai never had reason to complain about Sundar or his brother's performance, says Raman.“Only once his mother said that both were intelligent.“ For several years the family did not have a telephone and it was only when Sundar was about 12 years old that they got a landline. Sundar's family vehicle was a blue Lambretta. While Regunatha would ride the scooter with Sundar standing between his legs, Srinivasan would be on the seat between his father and mother.
The big transformation in his life came at IIT, where his interest in electronics and IT grew. “Though he did BTech in metallurgy from Kharagpur, he was interested in electronics,“ said Raman. IIT was also where Sundar met his future wife, Anjali, a native of Mumbai.
A soft-spoken, amiable person with an outstanding academic record, Sundar managed to land a coveted scholarship at an Ivy League college. “He first completed MS from Stanford University and after this Anjali did MS while Sundar was doing a stint as a consultant at McKinsey,“ said Raman.
Schools attended
On Wiki, a row over new CEO's school
The newsbreak on the new Google CEO sparked an unexpected turf war on Sundar Pichai's Wikipedia page with users altering the name of the schools in Chennai he studied in, online news trackers reported. Pichai finished his Class X from Jawahar Vidyalaya at Ashok Nagar and completed his 12th from Vana Vani Matriculation School. But names of such institutions as Padma Sheshadri Bala Bhavan School, GRT Mahalakshmi Vidyalaya and All Angels School made it to the page before they were eventually taken down. Chennai schools are known to be competitive and this may well have been a case of excited alumni trying to appropriate the world's hottest tech executive's schooling credentials.
In the student life
Polite to a fault, genteel and -for a man who runs the world's second most highly-valued company -he is down-to-earth, and amazingly particular about being respectful to everyone in the room. But was there another side to him as well, asked the “fire-side“ chat moderator, Hitesh Oberoi, co-promoter, managing director and CEO of Info Edge.Did he bunk morning classes? “Of course,“ came the answer. “It's a rite of passage in college,“ said Pichai.“I have to say I worked hard but we had our share of fun.“
On hostel memories and ragging
As we walked back into time with Pichai to his old hostel room B-308, in the B-west wing of Nehru residence hall, you could see he was visibly moved. “Could you give me a moment, please,“ he politely request ed the crowding camera crews, trying hard to gather his emotions as he looked around his old room and met its current occupants.
“It looks remarkably the same,“ he told us a few moments later, as we walked through the corridor outside, just a “little bit cleaner.“
“We used to play cricket here and all the glass windows would constantly get broken,“ said the man who runs Google. “In winter, it used to get cold so we used to tape it up with paper. I made Maggi late in the night around here,“ he pointed with relish to a corner.
Was he ragged? “A little, but it was all in good spirit...As a freshman you lock your room and you go out and when you come back your room doors aren't open but everything inside has been rearranged, even the furniture. So it is quite a shock.“
On travelling third class, and Project Nilgiri
Later as we walk down Kharagpur's railway junction, and he reminiscences about the time when he used to catch the Coromandel Express from here to Chennai, we also sample the high-speed free Wi-Fi that Google has enabled at the station as part of its promise to Prime Minis ter Modi under the Digital India project. Under a project that Googlers internally call Project Nilgiri, Wi-Fi connectivity was to be enabled at 400 of India's biggest stations. How many have been connected so far? “In the first year, our goal was 100. We completed 110, and we look forward to doing more.“
The project has thrown up some very interesting trends. Data usage shows that Bhubaneswar railway station, for example, started getting more footfalls than Bombay Central, because students started coming in to hang out and use the Wi-Fi. “I find in rural areas, people actually come into the stations so they can use internet,“ added Pichai. “It shows the demand Indian users have.“
Bridging the digital divide
Later, as we walk into Gokulpur, one of 60,000 villages in 10 states where Google has been training women volunteers (called Google saathis to use mobile phones) he listens intently to the women. With only 1 in 10 rural women an internet user, the digital divide is also a gender divide.So what has he learnt from the village women, we ask. “Something like this you don't fully internalize till you experience,“ he says. “You ask them what they would like to see and they say a puja, or god or a temple and they see it. That's what draws them to internet. Then they find recipes, health information and so on and they all want more of it.“
On failing and learning
The first time he sat on a plane was when he went to the US to study at Stanford. Has India's education system changed since and how should it change? Pichai weighs in on the side of creativity and learning by experimenting. As he told his student audience in Kharagpur, “I get surprised when I hear people start preparing for IIT in 8th grade. I hope they are really taking time to do things in a deeper way, understanding things deeper and learning by doing things. Setbacks actually don't matter...It's important to keep your dreams and follow those.Most of how life plays out is up to you and not on what happens outside of you. Take the long view.“
What is his advice to students?
“It is important to get real world experience. In the US, like at Stanford, most people don't choose their major till their final year. They do different things and find out what they are really passionate about...Academics is important but not as important as it is made out to be.“
Later as he picks up a bat to knock a few balls around at an impromptu pitch in Gokulpur, he says he didn't make it to his hostel cricket team but loved to watch Gavaskar bat. Who is his favourite today? “Watching Virat Kohli through the last year has been pretty amazing. I didn't think somebody could have an average of over 50 in all three forms of the game,“ he signs off.
In brief
Sundar Pichai — who grew up in a two-room apartment in Chennai’s middle-class neighbourhood, Ashok Nagar, in the 1970s and 1980s — is taking over as the CEO of one of the world’s most cash-rich companies, Alphabet, the parent company of search engine giant Google.
In a move that marks the end of an era, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google in 1998, are stepping down from their executive roles at Alphabet.
Page and Brin, both Stanford graduates, have been two of the technology industry’s most influential figures, considered on a par with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Apple founder Steve Jobs.
Pichai, 47, has been the face of the tech giant as CEO of the main business since 2015. He takes charge of Alphabet at a challenging time, as it faces increased regulatory scrutiny of large digital companies and internal employee unrest, while battling to stay at the forefront of technological change.
Pichai’s elevation was announced after market hours on Tuesday in the US, with Page giving up his role as Alphabet CEO and Brin quitting as president.
‘Pichai brings deep passion for tech’
Google sits on a cash pile of $128 billion, second only to Microsoft’s $137 billion, as per Factset. But Brin and Page, who are each worth over $50 billion, have stayed away from most of the day-today management and public appearances, including internal all-hands meetings, for the last few years.
“Today, in 2019, if the company was a person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the roost. While it has been a tremendous privilege to be deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the company for so long, we believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents—offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!” wrote Page and Brin in a letter to Alphabet employees on Tuesday. The move is driven to “simplify our management structure”, they wrote, adding that “Sundar brings humility and a deep passion for technology to our users, partners and our employees every day...There is no one that we have relied on more since Alphabet was founded, and no better person to lead Google and Alphabet into the future.”
Pichai tweeted that he was “excited about his new role”. He also wrote to employees, “In my 15+ years with Google, the only constant I’ve seen is change….. I first met Larry and Sergey back in 2004 and have been benefiting from their guidance and insights ever since. The good news is I’ll continue to work with them — although in different roles for them and me.”
Pichai, an alumnus of IITKharagpur, who also holds an MS from Stanford and MBA from Wharton, joined Google in 2004 and worked on the development of the Chrome browser, Gmail and Google Maps. In 2013, he started overseeing Android, the operating system for smartphones. In 2014, Pichai was also considered a contender for the CEO role at Microsoft, which went to another Indian origin executive, Satya Nadella. He was named Google's CEO in August 2015, when the company announced its restructuring, and joined Alphabet's board 2017. Since Pichai became Google CEO, the share price of the company has doubled, giving it a market capitalisation of $894 billion at the close of trade on Tuesday. Besides leading revenue growth and product development, Pichai has also faced a regulatory backlash against tech on issues like privacy and political bias in the US including testimony to the US Congress in December 2018.
Pichai has been able to take Google — which was already a big business at revenues of $18.5 billion during the September 2015 quarter when he took over - and make it huge, at over $40.3 billion in the September 2019 quarter, a span of five years. As CEO of Alphabet, Pichai will now be in charge of multiple such businesses which can potentially be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, according to Rajan Anandan, who was the India and Southeast Asia CEO of Google for about a decade till earlier this year. “Sundar has a very unique combination of several things that make him an extraordinary leader — vision, team building, execution, humility and also the ability to make a deep connection with individuals,” said Anandan, adding that Sundar’s ability to stay calm, be thoughtful and “not get frazzled” makes him the perfect leader as Alphabet faces regulatory and policy headwinds.
Even as Page and Brin leave management roles at Alphabet, they will continue to hold voting shares of over 50% in the company giving them a say in any major decisions.
2019/ Nandan Nilekani on Pichai
Nandan Nilekani, Dec 5, 2019 Times of India
I first met Sundar Pichai in 2013 along with Larry Page and others when I visited Mountain View (Google headquarters). Even then I was very impressed. He had a very calm demeanor and was very humble. What I liked about both him and Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO) is that they both wear their jobs lightly. They are not ‘big ego’ guys. That’s the kind of leadership that’s required in the current tech world where lots of people are very talented and, many a time, temperamental, and you need to carry all of them along. Sundar has done a terrific job of that.
I even did a fireside chat with him in front of employees then. I was with UIDAI then and he wanted me to talk about Aadhaar to Google employees. He’s also a very good product architect. He’s betting big on artificial intelligence.
Sundar’s also very pro-India and has invested heavily in India. Building Google Pay, the ‘Next Billion users’ initiative, etc, show the very big push on India. He will make a very good CEO of Alphabet. Over the years Alphabet has taken on a very diverse portfolio: autonomous cars, GoogleX, Verily (healthcare and disease prevention research), Calico (research into longevity, life expansion). He will take stock of this whole range and rationalise it in some ways. It will benefit from a fresh pair of eyes, from fresh thinking. It’s a wonderful opportunity.
Reasons for success
The Times of India, Apr 03 2016
Being `boring' is the reason behind Sundar Pichai's success
Drawing less attention to himself is the brilliant management strategy Google's new CEO used to become a powerful executive
A recent BuzzFeed profile of Google's new CEO, Sundar Pichai, paints a picture of Pichai as an even-keeled, relatively predictable kind of guy. Formerly Google's product chief, Pichai became Google's CEO in 2015, after the company re-organised its management structure. Google's then-CEO, Larry Page, became CEO of parent company Alphabet, which oversees Google as well as other initiatives, including Nest and Google Ventures.
Although he's now in charge of one of the world's most i n f luenti a l companies, Pichai is hardly the kind of emotiona l ly volati le leader often seen in Silicon Va l ley. A n d t h at seems to be a winning strategy for him.
BuzzFeed spoke to a former Google manager who described Pichai's MO in meetings: “He never aligned with Susan, or Marissa, or Omid, or even Eric.“ (That's Susan Wojcicki, Marissa M ayer, Omid Kordestani, and Eric Schmidt, all former and current Google executives.) “He a lways shot right down the middle. How could you ever rea l ly know what someone like that is really thinking?“ As the online portal puts it, Pichai is a “kind of boring bestfor-the-company man.“
In fact, research suggests that, contrary to popular belief, boringness is a key trait of effective leaders.According to Tomas ChamorroP r emu z ic , a pr o fe s s or o f business psychology, managers who are perceived as predictable and reliable tend to be the most effective.
Chamorro-Premuzic says being boring is really about being emotionally mature, which means being emotionally stable, agreeable, and conscientious. Meanwhile, an analysis by Google revealed that the best leaders are predictable and consistent. Chamorro-Premuzic also explains that the most successful leaders don't neces sarily exude charisma, which he says is “just a politically correct term for narcissism“.
The bottom line is, research suggests that leaders who stay out of the spotlight are the ones who lead their companies to greatness.
Did Twitter rumours hasten Pichai's rise?
The Times of India, Aug 13 2015
Was Twitter tempting Sundar Pichai with the offer of its CEO position?
Did that get Google to fast forward its reorganization move?
There's been intense speculation along these lines ever since Google announced, suddenly and rather unexpectedly , that it was creating a new umbrella company called Alphabet which would have under it a slimmed down Google and a slew of other ventures that would be independent of Google. Business Insider quoted a person close to Twitter as saying: “I've been hearing that (the speculation) too and I wouldn't be shocked if they want him as CEO. They tried to hire him once about three years ago and got very close. Google countered with a huge package to keep him there. I can't imagine him making the change after being named CEO of Google today .“
Twitter has been looking for a CEO since June, when the then CEO Dick Costolo resigned. Twitter had then announced that co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey would be interim CEO while the Board conducts an executive search.
Few believe Pichai would have been tempted by the offer, if indeed it was made. Pichai, as the No 2 at Google, a far more powerful company than Twitter, would likely have been comfortable where he was. In 2011, it was rumoured that Twitter had tried to lure Pichai to head the company's consumer product division, and that Google awarded Pichai millions of dollars in stock grants to stop him from leaving.
Pichai, with his strengths in technology and execution, and his ability to take everybody along, has always been seen as a potentially prized catch for rivals. He was also rumoured to be one of the contenders for the CEO position of Microsoft, when the company was conducting its own search in 2014
As CEO, Google
2019: staff’s faith in Pichai’s vision decreases to 78%
Google staff’s faith in Pichai’s vision on wane: In-house poll, February 3, 2019: The Times of India
Alphabet’s Google became the most-profitable internet company by recruiting talented technologists and inspiring them enough to keep them around. That advantage may be slipping as some workers increasingly doubt the leadership and vision of CEO Sundar Pichai, according to recent results from an employee survey.
The annual internal poll, known as Googlegeist, asked workers whether Pichai’s vision of what the company can achieve inspires them. In response, 78% indicated yes, down 10 percentage points from the previous year.
Another question asked if employees have confidence in Pichai and his management team to effectively lead Google in the future. Positive responses represented 74% of the total, an 18 point decline from a year earlier.
There were similar declines for questions about Pichai’s decisions and strategies, his commitment to diversity and inclusion, and the compensation the company pays, according the results. Google shares the results with all employees to make sure concerns are heard. This time, 89% of workers took the survey. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment. While the survey findings are mostly positive, the declines are a worrying shift for Google, which prides itself on high employee morale, good working conditions and high pay.
If these things are beginning to erode, Google could lose talent to other technology firms, undermining its ability to build new services that drive its profitable advertising business. Still, most Googlers aren’t leaving soon, with 82% of survey respondents saying they plan to be working at Google one year from now. And 86% said they would recommend Google as a place to work.
As CEO of Alphabet
2019
One era ends, another begins
Jack Nicas & Daisuke Wakabayashi Dec 5, 2019: Times of India
From: Jack Nicas & Daisuke Wakabayashi Dec 5, 2019: Times of India
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Stanford graduate students who founded Google over two decades ago, are stepping down from executive roles at Google’s parent company, Alphabet, they announced on Tuesday.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, will become the chief of both Google and Alphabet. The move is an end of an era for Google. Page and Brin have personified the company since its founding and have been two of the technology industry’s most influential figures, on a par with the founders of Apple and Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Their early work on the Google search engine helped corral an unruly cloud of information on the World Wide Web. And their ideas about how to run an internet company — like offering generous employee perks like free shuttle buses to the office and making rankand-file employees feel as though they have a stake in the company — became a standard for Silicon Valley.
Page is the son of academics from Michigan, while Brin’s family emigrated to Maryland from the Soviet Union when he was a child and he considers himself a refugee. They met at Stanford, where in 1996 they came up with the invention that spawned Google. Page was the visionary while Brin, a math prodigy, led the engineering.
Page and Brin took lesser roles in day-to-day operations in 2015 when they turned Google into Alphabet, a holding company that includes the self-driving car company Waymo under its umbrella.
Since then, they have spent more time overseeing a variety of so-called other bets, like life-extension technology, while Pichai ran Google and its enormous search and advertising business. Brin moved his desk for a time to X, the so-called moonshot lab where engineers worked on projects that were likely to fail — but had big potential if they didn’t. Page was rarely a presence on Google’s campus and was working on long-shot technology problems and personal side projects like his flying-car startup, Kitty Hawk. The business has continued to grow and Alphabet is among the most valuable companies in the world, but the internet giant is entering one of the most turbulent periods in its history, with antitrust scrutiny, employee walkouts and growing public scepticism of its power.
Page and Brin, who are both 46, will remain directors on Alphabet’s board and the company’s two largest individual shareholders. They retain a majority of the company’s voting shares, which will give them effective control over the board and ensure they maintain a say over the company’s future.
– NYT NEWS SERVICE
