Known in the corporate world as Sundar Pichai, Pichai Sundararajan, as his full name indicates, was born on June 10, 1972, in Madras—now Chennai—Tamil Nadu, India.
He is an executive raised in the United States, although born in India, Chief Executive Officer of Google Inc. since 2015—and its holding company, Alphabet Inc., since 2019.
His success is making history.
Sundar Pichai’s life story from childhood to CEO of Google
When he was a boy growing up in Madras, Pichai slept with his brother in the living room of the small family home—what would be the foyer or the living room of an American house.
His father, an electrical engineer at the British multinational GEC, made sure the children received a good education, although the household had no excess.
At an early age, Pichai showed interest in technology and had an extraordinary memory, especially for phone numbers.
After earning a degree in metallurgy (B.Tech., 1993) and a silver medal at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, he received a scholarship to study at Stanford University (M.S. in engineering and materials science, 1995).
He remained in the United States from then on, working briefly for Applied Materials (a semiconductor materials supplier) and then earning an MBA (2002) from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Director of product management and development at Google: the opportunity
After a brief stint at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., Pichai joined Google in 2004 as director of product management and development.
He initially worked on the Google Toolbar, which allowed users of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox to easily access the Google search engine.
Over the following years, he was directly involved in developing Google’s own browser, Chrome, which was released to the public in 2008.
That same year, Pichai was named Vice President of Product Development and began taking a more active role.
By 2012, he was Senior Vice President, and two years later he was named Head of Product for both Google and the Android smartphone operating system.
In 2011, Pichai was reportedly aggressively pursued by microblogging service Twitter, and in 2014 he was floated as a potential CEO of Microsoft—but in both cases, he was granted large financial packages to remain at Google.
He is also known for helping to negotiate Google’s $3.2 billion deal to acquire Nest Labs in 2014.
Therefore, when Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced the creation of Alphabet Inc. in August 2015, industry experts were not surprised when Pichai was named CEO of Google, which was reorganized as a subsidiary.
In December 2019, he was also named CEO of Alphabet, replacing Page, who stepped down.
His career is still at its peak and promises to achieve incredible milestones within and for his company. What will be the next step?