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Influencer Column :Sundar Pichai - CEO of Google

Sundar Pichai, in full name Pichai Sundararajan, had born in 1972, July 12, in Madras (now Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India), Indian-born American executive who was CEO of both Google, Inc. (2015), and its holding company, Alphabet Inc. (2019).

As a boy growing up in Madras, Pichai slept with his brother in the living room for the cramped family home, but his father, an electrical engineer at the British multinational GEC, saw that the boys received a good education.

At an early age Pichai displayed an interest in technology and an extraordinary memory, especially for the telephone numbers. After earning a B.Tech degree in metallurgy since 1993 and a silver medal at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, Pichai was awarded a scholarship for the study at Stanford University (M.S. in engineering and materials science, since 1995). Pichai remained in the United States thereafter, working briefly for Applied Materials (a supplier of semiconductor materials) and then earning an M.B.A. since 2002 from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Following a short stint at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., Pichai joined Google since 2004 as the head of product management and development. Pichai initially worked on the Google Toolbar, which enabled those using the Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox Web browsers to easily access the Google search engine. For the next few years, Pichai was directly involved in the development of Google’s own browser, Chrome, which was released to the public since 2008.

That same year Pichai was named vice president of product development and Pichai began to take a more-active public role. Since 2012, Pichai was a senior vice president, and two years later Pichai was made product chief over both Google and the Android smart-phone operating system.

Since 2011 Pichai reportedly was aggressively pursued for employment by micro-blogging service on Twitter and in 2014, Pichai was touted as a possible CEO for Microsoft, but in both instances Pichai was granted large financial packages to remain with Google. Pichai also was known to have helped negotiate Google’s approximate 3.2 billion deals with the acquire Nest Labs in 2014. Therefore, when Google cofounders Larry Page or Sergey Brin announced the creation of Alphabet Inc., since 2015 August, it came as no surprise to industry insiders that Pichai was named CEO of Google, which was reorganized as a subsidiary. Since 2019 December, Pichai also was named CEO of Alphabet, replacing Page, who stepped down.

In recently over 20,000 Googlers protested against for the company of alleged attempts to curb sexual harassment. Sundar Pichai maintained his calm amid the worldwide protest by Googlers. Pichai said that the People are walking out because they want us to improve and they want us to show we can do better. We are acknowledging and understanding we clearly got some things wrong.