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The rise of Sundar Pichai — Google’s new CEO

SAN FRANCISCO — One of Mr Sundar Pichai’s clearest memories of growing up in Chennai, India, involves picking up the results of a blood test for one of his parents. It was the early 1980s and, while the family lived in a middle-class neighbourhood, they did not have a telephone, car or television. There was no way to get the results other than to retrieve them in person.

Mr Pichai is well liked by many in the software community for his affable manner and friendly approach to his subordinates and contemporaries. Photo: AP

Mr Pichai is well liked by many in the software community for his affable manner and friendly approach to his subordinates and contemporaries. Photo: AP

SAN FRANCISCO — One of Mr Sundar Pichai’s clearest memories of growing up in Chennai, India, involves picking up the results of a blood test for one of his parents. It was the early 1980s and, while the family lived in a middle-class neighbourhood, they did not have a telephone, car or television. There was no way to get the results other than to retrieve them in person.

Mr Pichai had to take a city bus two and a half hours across town to the hospital and wait in a long line. When the results weren’t ready, he returned home empty-handed. In the United States, “technology happens so fast, change is more continuous for people and sometimes they don’t internalise it,” he said in a Bloomberg Businessweek interview last year. “For me, it happened in these discrete moments.”

From that relatively hard-scrabble upbringing (his family got around by piling on to a Lambretta scooter), Mr Pichai attended the Indian Institute of Technology, won a scholarship to Stanford University, worked at the early Silicon Valley blue chip Applied Materials and in management consulting at McKinsey & Co. He joined Google after trying to talk one of his McKinsey colleagues out of going there, and then realising the arguments in favour of joining the company were better.

That was 10 years ago. On Monday, Mr Pichai, 43, was tapped to be chief executive officer of Google itself, the dominant unit of the new holding company Alphabet, a stunningly rapid ascent to the top echelon of US business. Now comes the hard part. His new role will be about positioning Google for the future, which hands him some of the toughest jobs in all of tech — like shifting the profit engine from the desktop to mobile and combating the rapid growth of Amazon.com in e-commerce and cloud computing and Facebook in social networking.

“The challenge is how to sustain revenue growth and profit enhancement in the face of slowing search growth,” said Mr Brian Wieser, a senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group. “When you are 90 per cent of the market, it’s hard to get much bigger.”

The promotion announced on Monday was the latest for an Indian-born executive in technology, with Mr Satya Nadella named chief executive of Microsoft in 2014 and Mr George Kurian appointed chief executive of storage company NetApp in June. Mr Kurian’s brother, Mr Thomas Kurian, is president of product development at Oracle, while Mr Shantanu Narayen is chief executive of Adobe Systems.

At Google though, no lieutenant has been as trusted as Mr Pichai during the past few years. After he joined the company in 2004, Mr Pichai made a name for himself early as a product manager working on high-profile efforts such as Chrome, the company’s Web browser. Chrome grew like a weed, exploding from a single-digit percentage of market share to become the most widely used browser across desktops and mobile devices in the world, according to StatCounter.

Two years ago, Google co-founder Larry Page promoted Mr Pichai to also oversee Android, the software that runs 78 per cent of the smartphones sold around the globe, after Mr Andy Rubin stepped down. “Sundar has a talent for creating products that are technically excellent yet easy to use — and he loves a big bet,” Mr Page wrote then. “Take Chrome, for example. In 2008, people asked whether the world really needed another browser. Today, Chrome has hundreds of millions of happy users.”

During his rise at Google, Mr Pichai had suitors. In 2011, Twitter tried to lure Mr Pichai to run the company’s consumer product division, according to two people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity because the talks were not made public. And last year, Mr Pichai was rumoured to be in the running to replace Mr Steven Ballmer as chief executive of Microsoft. Mr Pichai is well liked by many in the software community at large for his affable manner and friendly approach to his subordinates and contemporaries. “Sundar never has a bad day. His positive energy is contagious and his optimism attracts the best talent,” said Mr Chris Sacca, a venture capitalist and former colleague of Mr Pichai’s at Google.

Mr Pichai’s father, a retired engineer who once oversaw the factory floor for a company that made electrical relays, said he used to speak with his older son about his job and its challenges. “Even at a young age,” the father said in an email last year, “he was curious about my work, and I think that really attracted him to technology.”

In Mr Pichai’s senior year of high school, he competed in the National Talent Search Examination (which included tests in mathematics and science) and received a scholarship awarded to only 750 students nationally. He got a coveted spot at IIT, but the family’s true sacrifice came when he won the scholarship to Stanford in 1993. While Mr Pichai’s father remembers making careful preparations to furnish his son with the 25,000 rupees (S$545) for airfare, plus additional expenses for living, Mr Pichai recalls that his parents ransacked their bank account to send him to the US.

“My dad and my mom did what a lot of parents did,” he said. “They sacrificed a lot of their life and used a lot of their disposable income to make sure the children were educated.”

In the US for the first time, Mr Pichai immediately commented that the fields looked remarkably brown (“no, they’re golden,” he said his host family corrected him) and started missing his girlfriend Anjali back home (she is now his wife and mother of their two kids). At Stanford, he got unfettered access to computers, and to the Internet, for the first time. The rest is history. He talked last year about the necessity of making dramatic changes in life, and in business. “I believe we have clear momentum but the ground underneath is constantly shifting and evolving. Either you adapt, and you are at the forefront and you drive this. Or someone else takes it over.” Agencies

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