Over a year ago, Sundar Pichai, rawboned, smiling, and freshly 42, stepped out in front the millions that were present physically and virtually onto the stage of Google's 8th annual I/O developers conference as the senior vice president of Android, Chrome, and Apps. Now, he sits as the newly appointed CEO of the equally new "slimmed down" Google – a part of Larry Page and Sergey Brin's larger conglomerate, Alphabet.
The name, new to many, produced a near-anthemic roar among the 6,000 developers present at the May 2015 conference – who, within seconds, hoisted their phones into the air trying to capture the moment.
Pichai has been at Google for just short of a dozen years, after having held a few management positions at Applied Materials and McKinsey & Company. He joined Google in 2004 as a small-time product manager for its toolbar, which later manifested into the creation of Google Chrome in 2008. This was an incredibly important step in Pichai's career, handling a plug-in that allowed the Google browser toolbar to appear as a default search engine on Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (pissing off Microsoft in the process).
When what would beome the world's single largest web browser finally launched, Pichai was named vice president in 2009 and then senior vice president in 2012, allowing him to govern oversight of basically every Google application that wasn't YouTube. This was shortly followed by an expansion toward Android, previously managed by Andy Rubin.
In many ways, Chrome was the giant hot air balloon to which Pichai's then infant Google career was tethered. Its failure would have been his failure. But regardless of the pressure resting on his shoulders, Pichai managed to maintain strong relationships with everyone he worked with, including Page and Brin.
As The Los Angeles Times reports, early in his career, Pichai would often wait outside his then boss (now CEO and president of Yahoo) Marissa Mayer's office to keep her updated with his team's activities. On the Google blog post that announced Pichai's promotion, Page wrote, "he has really stepped up since October of last year, when he took on product and engineering responsibilities for our Internet businesses. Sergey and I have been super excited about his progress and dedication to the company."
Pichai's educational background – although not peculiar to the current crop of top business and product executives around the world – does give us a little insight into his demeanor and outlook. Born in Madras, India, in 1972, Pichai went on to study metallurgical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), something of a factory that produces technically equipped and socially conscious professionals.
These have ranged from KFC CEO Mukesh Pant to the current Defense Minister of India Manohar Parrikar, to social activist and bassist of the single biggest Indian rock band, Indian Ocean. To put things into perspective, IIT's nationwide acceptance rate is 2 percent, compared with Harvard's 5.9 percent and MIT's 8.9 percent. It paints a vivid picture of where Pichai, now at the top of the ladder, gets his humility and drive – from actually having climbed that ladder.
From an early age, Pichai gained access to an exclusive club of people who knew how to ask the right questions – his subsequent degrees from Stanford (the alma mater of his two bosses at Alphabet) and then from The Wharton School, the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, were simply the icing on the cake.
Going forward, Pichai is slowly beginning to formulate his plans for the new and refocused Google. From the looks of it, Page and Brin's Alphabet will allow him to do this autonomously. Pichai's Google will be guided by two main ideologies: an increase in scale and a better way of organizing information. These ideas, bolstered with Google's typical rhetoric of making the world a better place, recur often in Pichai's explanations.
In a recent interview with The Verge, Pichai said, "the entire PC industry reached about 1.7 billion people. [But with mobile], we are truly dealing with the first computing platform [that] is going to touch people at scale."
For Pichai, technology has the potential to behave as an "equalizing force," and access is the first step to that – "at our core, we want to build products for everyone. At a basic level, at a foundational level, [that means] both providing computing and making it accessible."
For Google, it means taking someone who's heart and head are in the right place and putting them in the driver's seat.
