He grew up in a humble two-room apartment on the
southern tip of India, and when he won a Stanford scholarship his
flight to San Francisco cost more than his father's annual salary.
But the investment paid off, and after a quiet rise through Google, Sundar Pichai has now been appointed as chief executive of the search and advertising giant.
Colleagues say he is known as a diplomat with an incredible memory - a skill he first discovered when his family got their first rotary phone when he was 12.
He realised that after keying in a new telephone number once, it was locked in his brain.
But he was not a typical geek locked in a basement tapping out code.
Instead he captained his high school cricket team to victory in the regional finals.
His grades won him a place at Stanford where he couldn't even afford a required $60 (£38) backpack, and he eventually dropped out of his PhD programme to focus on a business career.
After work at chipmaker Applied Materials and gaining an MBA at the Wharton school, he joined Google on April Fool's Day in 2004.
It was the same day the company launched email service Gmail, a feature many people assumed to be a prank.
Mr Pichai got stuck working on the low-profile Google search bar on the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers.
But he began to get noticed when he suggested that Google work on its own browser.
The idea was dismissed by then-CEO Eric Schmidt, but Mr Pichai persevered and the browser - now known as Google Chrome - became a hit.
He then championed the Chromebook concept - cheap netbooks that store everything in the cloud - which now make up a quarter of PC sales.
It is rumoured that he was paid a bonus of tens of millions of dollars to keep him at Google when Twitter tried to poach him in 2010.
His loyalty paid off - he ended up running the Android mobile operating system, and has now taken the crown as overall boss of Google.
No comments:
Post a Comment