He’s an IIT alum
Sundar Pichai was born Sundarajan Pichai. He studied at Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, before moving to Stanford to study materials science and semiconductor physics, but he later dropped out.
He’s breaking new ground
Pichai will be the first CEO of Google who isn’t a white man.
He’s responsible for Google Chrome
When Pichai started at Google in 2004, he was working on the search toolbar (the small little widget in the corner of your browsers) but he was convinced Google should have its own browser. Chrome now holds 32 percent of the browser market on phones and desktop PCs, ahead of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Apple’s Safari, according to Adobe.
He’s a whiz with numbers
The Pichais got their first telephone, a rotary, when Sundar was 12. And with it he discovered an unusual gift: He could remember every number he ever dialled. “My uncle would call up and say, ‘Hey, I lost this phone number, but you once helped me dial it,’ and I would be able to tell him,” Pichai says. “I wasn’t so sure that was useful.” It is now: Google executives marvel at Pichai’s powers of numerical recall. Alan Eustace, vice president for engineering, says that during a recent meeting, Pichai produced a statistic related to the increase of voice-activated searches. “That’s my area,” Eustace says, “and he knew a number I did not know.”
He’s the best man for the job
“Sundar has been saying the things I would have said (and sometimes better!) for quite some time now, and I’ve been tremendously enjoying our work together,” Page said in a blog post announcing Alphabet. Apart from that, he’s also overseen Gmail and Google Docs (2011), Android (2013) and Maps and Google+ (2014).
He’s much loved within the giant company with over 55,000 employees
“I would challenge you to find anyone at Google who doesn’t like Sundar or who thinks Sundar is a jerk,” says Caesar Sengupta, a vice president who has worked with Pichai for eight years.
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