From an IIT Graduate to a CEO in Google

Google’s announcement that it would be subsumed within a new parent company called Alphabet had a bonus for people of Indian-origin world over: the company’s head of Products and Engineering, Chennai-born Pichai Sundararajan, was anointed the CEO of the new, “slimmed down” Google.

Pichai, who is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur and Stanford University is the man to head their $66-billion revenue, $16-billion profit, company– by most accounts he combines a deep passion for engineering excellence with a rare managerial quality of attracting the best talent into the teams he works with.

Pichai started at Google in 2004, where he was known as a “low-key manager” who worked on the Google toolbar and then led the launch of the market-beating Chrome browser in 2008.

Nowhere was Pichai’s easy blending of techno-diplomatic competence evident than in early 2014, when the fracas between Samsung and Google was reaching fever pitch, at the time over Samsung’s Magazine UX interface for its tablets, which Google felt may have been deliberately underselling Google services such as its Play apps store.

The Google founders no doubt recognised that Pichai was a man on an evangelical type mission for pushing the boundaries of technology.