How many CFOs do you know who would quit their high-paying job at a multi-billion dollar company to go backpacking around the world?
Not much, but Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette is one of them. The Canadian-born French will be retiring from Google at the relatively young age of 52 after spending more than six years managing the search company's coffers and being the public face of Google when communicating with its investors.
Google declared Pichette's upcoming retirement in a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and expects to find a replacement in six months, during which Pichette will help find and train his successor.
Pichette himself also announced his impending retirement on his personal Google+ page, a note which Google CEO Larry Page called "a most unconventional leaving notice from a most unconventional CFO." In his note, Pichette said his retirement is the culmination of 30 years of "nearly non-stop work," or around 1,500 weeks of always being on a frenetic pace, "even when I was not supposed to be."
Pichette says his decision to retire was the result of a question asked by his wife, Tamar, while the two were watching the sunrise from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa one early morning in September. She suggested that they keep exploring Africa, then turn east to India, then the Himalayas, Everest, Bali, the Great Barrier Reef, and even Antarctica. Pichette told his wife the typical CFO response: "It's not time yet," so they trekked back down and Pichette went back to Mountain View. But his wife's question haunted him. "When is it going to be time? Our time? My time?"
"I could not find a good argument to tell Tamar we should wait any longer for us to grab our backpacks and hit the road - celebrate our last 25 years together by turning the page and enjoy a perfectly fine mid-life crisis full of bliss and beauty and leave the door open to serendipity for our next leadership opportunities, once our long list of travels and adventures is exhausted," Pichette says.
Pichette is credited not just for managing Google's $64 billion cash hoard but also for bringing discipline into a company that unsparingly spends its money on moonshot projects such as self-driving cars, Internet balloons, and pills that can track one's health status, an accomplishment that has earned investors' respect for Pichette. Wall Street is frustrated by Google's free-spending ways because its investments are not directly related to its main search and advertising business.
In 2013, Pichette took over the unpalatable task of defending Google's investments that are not likely to get a return within the next few years to Wall Street during Google's quarterly conference calls.
Although Google's shares dropped 2.4 percent following Pichette's announcement, Hudson Square Research analyst Daniel Ernst tells Reuters his retirement is not likely to make a dent in investor relations since Google has a "relatively straightforward business."
"Any experienced CFO could slot in there and see how it all works," Ernst says.
Photo: C2 Montreal | Flickr
