What did Sundar Pichai do to get promoted through the ranks from an entry level PM to CEO of Google?

Google’s Director of Marketing and Brand Manager Doug Edwards shared this awesome story about how Sundar Pichai raised from a simple PM to the CEO level in Google.

He Said;

I remember Sundar’s first project at Google, because I had been working on it for weeks before he started at the company.

Larry had asked me to coordinate with the sales, legal, and engineering groups to develop some guidelines around what we would allow partner companies to bundle with Google’s toolbar as downloadable apps.

At the time, toolbars that included search capability were all the rage, and every company was trying to get users to download their flavour.

We wanted our toolbars downloaded because we feared Microsoft would embed their own search window into the Microsoft Explorer browser, making it easier to search from there than to go to Google, and partnerships were a good way to add distribution quickly.

After hours of negotiating the competing priorities of each Google team, I came to a meeting with Larry and Sergey to present the draft proposal.

Also in attendance were Sergey, Larry’s admin, Salar Kamangar (I think) and Sundar, who may have started that week.

As I started to go through the language, which walked a tightrope between protecting us legally if a partner downloaded malware with our toolbar and still enabled the sales team to actively seek partnerships without being overly restrictive, Larry grew restless.

“This is too complicated,” he complained. “It should be simpler! It should be as plain as ‘Don’t be evil.’” He turned to his administrative assistant and she agreed.

I tried to explain that the guidelines struck exactly the right balance and had been approved by all the stakeholders after many hours of discussion, but Larry just looked annoyed.

“Sundar, why don’t you give this a try?” he said.

I had no idea who Sundar was or why Larry thought he would do a better job than I had, but clearly Larry had a lot of confidence in him.

Sure enough, a week later, Sundar had simplified everything and Larry signed off on the new wording.

I never felt any animosity toward Sundar, who seemed (and later interactions verified) to be a very nice guy.

It wasn’t the first time someone else had been given responsibility for something I thought was in my realm (I talk about this phenomenon in my book, “I’m Feeling Lucky.”), and it actually was a relief not to have to deal with it any more.

So, sure, I’m happy to state that Sundar’s rise to CEO started with my own inability to do the task assigned to me, giving him the opportunity to prove his worth to Larry and Sergey.

I haven’t spoken with him in years, but maybe I should remind him of that in case his biographer asks him how it all began.

Sundar Pichai, in full Pichai Sundararajan, (born June 10, 1972, 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 of 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 telephone numbers.

After earning a degree in metallurgy (B.Tech., 1993) and a silver medal at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, he was awarded a scholarship to study at Stanford University (M.S. in engineering and materials science, 1995).

He remained in the United States thereafter, working briefly for Applied Materials (a supplier of semiconductor materials) and then earning an M.B.A. (2002) from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Following a short stint at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., Pichai joined Google in 2004 as the head of product management and development.

He 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.

Over the next few years, he was directly involved in the development of Google’s own browser, Chrome, which was released to the public in 2008.

That same year Pichai was named vice president of product development, and he began to take a more-active public role.

By 2012 he was a senior vice president, and two years later he was made product chief over both Google and the Android smartphone operating system.

In 2011 Pichai reportedly was aggressively pursued for employment by microblogging service Twitter, and in 2014 he was touted as a possible CEO for Microsoft, but in both instances he was granted large financial packages to remain with Google.

He also was known to have helped negotiate Google’s $3.2 billion deal to acquire Nest Labs in 2014.

Therefore, when Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced the creation of Alphabet Inc., in August 2015, it came as no surprise to industry insiders that Pichai was named CEO of Google, which was reorganized as a subsidiary.

In December 2019 he also was named CEO of Alphabet, replacing Page, who stepped down.