Google co-founders—Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced Chennai-born Sundar Pichai as the new CEO of the search giant. Creating a new organisational structure, the co-founders are now heading a mother company called Alphabet.
The 43 year old Chennai native Sundar Pichai is a product of IIT Kharagpur. He had later went to Stanford and Wharton universities. He will be in charge of a slimmed down Google, which has been rechristened as Google Minus.
Pichai had joined Google in 2004. He worked on Chrome and Android, both of which have made amazing progress.
“very fortunate to have someone as talented as he is to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations…I know Sundar will always be focused on innovation—continuing to stretch boundaries…”. Wrote Larry Page in a letter to investors on 10 August.
Regarding the restructuring of Google, Page said in a blog "We've long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant," He further added "new structure will allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside of Google."
Sundar Pichai joins an elite group of Indian-origin CEOs, including Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. There are at least half a dozen of them in Fortune 500 companies. Indra Nooyi at Pepsi, Ajit Banga at Mastercard, and Sanjay Mehrotra at SanDisk are among them. Also, Ajit Jain is strongly tipped to succeed Warren Buffett at the third ranked Berkshire Hathaway.