Alphabet was kind of a loser 25 years ago, but as you should know, that’s not the case anymore. The Google-parent didn’t bounce back on its own though.
Meet Sundar Pichai, the man who quite literally dragged it. For ten long years, while the rest of Big Tech went off the rails or got dragged into Congress kicking and screaming, Sundar quietly rewired the engine room and kept Google from completely falling apart.
And yeah, I said “rewired” because this guy literally started life surrounded by wires.
Sundar was born June 10, 1972, in Madurai, in southern India, into a modest Tamil Hindu household. He did his early schooling at Jawahar Vidyalaya in Ashok Nagar, and wrapped up his final year at Vana Vani inside IIT Madras.
But it was IIT Kharagpur where he studied metallurgical engineering and built the foundation that took him out of India.
Next came a Master’s in materials science from Stanford, and then an MBA from Wharton, where Sundar was both a Siebel Scholar and a Palmer Scholar. Basically, this dude ticked every academic box without making noise.
Sundar ran Chrome, Maps, Drive, Gmail, and Android before stepping up
When Sundar joined Google in 2004, he didn’t get parachuted into some glamor gig. He started building things. Oh yeah. Chrome? ChromeOS? Google Drive? Gmail? Google Maps? All created by Sundar before most of the world even knew who he was.
In 2009, he was demoing ChromeOS on stage. By 2011, the Chromebook was out in testing. By 2012, it was shipping. He pushed VP8, Google’s new video codec, and introduced WebM, an open format. The company even open-sourced the whole thing. That was May 20, 2010.
From April 2011 to July 2013, Sundar also sat on the board of Jive Software, while still running half the product teams at Google. Then in 2013, the stakes got higher when he was handed Android, after Andy Rubin stepped aside. That literally gave our guy the keys to Google’s mobile future.
By 2014, Sundar’s name was floating around for the top job at Microsoft, but they gave it to Satya Nadella. Still, Larry Page didn’t miss. In August 2015, He got named the next Google CEO, and by October 24, once Alphabet Inc. became official, he was in charge.
Sundar handled Congress, layoffs, Project Nimbus, and took no sides
Naturally, there have been a few scandals for Sundar along the way. For instance, he had to fire a guy in August 2017 who wrote a 10-page memo complaining about diversity hiring. Google employees were divided, but Sundar didn’t hesitate, kicked the guy out.
By December 11, 2018, Sundar was testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee about everything from search bias to China censorship to data tracking.
And when Rep. Steve King pressed him about how search results work, Sundar told the panel, “Google employees do not manually alter search results.” He added that there were “no current plans for a censored search app in China.”
When the privacy topic came up, he said plainly, “Users can opt out of data collection.” In December 2019, Sundar officially became the CEO of Alphabet too. That put him above every product and every team. By 2022, his pay package hit $200 million.
That same year, Google went through a hiring boom. A year later, there were massive layoffs, and people all over social media were calling him out for taking that paycheck while cutting jobs.
As usual, he stayed quiet, because that’s Pichai.
Then came April 2024. Google fired 28 workers who protested Project Nimbus, a cloud contract with the Israeli government. The protests hit hard inside the company. “The office is not a place to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Sundar said in a memo, “and we must not use the company as a personal platform.” Straight up.
The recognition just kept stacking for Sundar. He landed on TIME’s 100 Most Influential list in 2016 and again in 2020. He showed up on the TIME 100 AI list in 2024. In 2021, he got the Asia Game Changer Award from the Asia Society.
And oh yeah! India’s government handed him the Padma Bhushan in 2022 for Trade and Industry. That’s their third-highest civilian award by the way.
Today, Alphabet is worth $4.4 trillion, only $600 billion away from dethroning Nvidia, the most valuable company on earth. And it would be this author’s absolute honor to watch Sundar go band-for-band with Jensen Huang. May the best CEO win.
