Sundar Pichai in 2023. Photo: Photographer: Lukasz Kobus (European Commission) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Sundar Pichai runs one of the most heavily used collections of software on the planet, and he got there by way of a metallurgy degree, a consulting job and a browser. Born June 10, 1972, in Tamil Nadu, India, he has led Google since October 2015 and its parent company, Alphabet, since December 2019.
His rise is less a story of a founder’s vision than of a manager who kept being handed bigger products to look after.
From Chennai to Stanford
Pichai was born Pichai Sundararajan. His mother, Lakshmi, worked as a stenographer, and his father, Regunatha Pichai, was an electrical engineer at the British conglomerate GEC. The family lived in Chennai, where he attended Jawahar Vidyalaya Senior Secondary School in Ashok Nagar and finished Class XII at Vana Vani school on the campus of IIT Madras.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in metallurgical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 1993. It was there he met Anjali Haryani, now Anjali Pichai. The couple has two children.
From India he went to Stanford University in California for a master’s degree in materials science and engineering, as a Siebel Scholar. He later added an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, as a Palmer Scholar. Before business school he worked in engineering and product management at Applied Materials, a semiconductor equipment maker, and afterward in management consulting at McKinsey & Company.
Joining Google
Pichai joined Google in 2004. He worked on product management and innovation for the company’s client software, the programs that run on a user’s own machine rather than on a distant server. That portfolio included the Chrome browser and ChromeOS, and he took charge of much of Google Drive. He also oversaw Gmail and Google Maps.
On March 13, 2013, he added Android to the list when he succeeded Andy Rubin as head of the mobile operating system. Between the browser, the phone software and the apps that ran on both, he held responsibility for most of the ways ordinary people reached Google’s services.
He also served on outside boards, including Jive Software from 2011 to 2013 and Magic Leap from 2014 to 2018.
Running Google and Alphabet
In August 2015, Google announced a restructuring that would place the company under a new holding company, Alphabet Inc. Pichai was selected as Google’s chief executive on August 10, 2015. He took the job on October 24, 2015, as the Alphabet arrangement was completed, with co-founder Larry Page leading the parent company. Pichai was appointed to the Alphabet board in 2017.
On December 3, 2019, Page and fellow co-founder Sergey Brin announced they would step down from their executive roles. Pichai took on the Alphabet chief executive job while keeping his position at Google. The founders stayed on as employees and kept majority voting control, according to Wikipedia’s account of the change. Alphabet is headquartered at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.
His tenure has included public scrutiny. On December 11, 2018, he was questioned by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on subjects including political bias, China and privacy. Google carried out large layoffs in 2023, and his pay, which topped $200 million in 2022, drew criticism from some employees in that context. In April 2024, after 28 employees were fired over protests tied to Project Nimbus, he told staff that the workplace was not a place to debate politics.
Google’s own blog describes the current focus under his leadership as building products and services that apply recent advances in artificial intelligence to everyday tasks. Time magazine named him to its list of the 100 most influential people in 2016 and 2020, and to its Time 100 AI list in 2024.
Honors and personal life
In 2022, the Indian government awarded Pichai the Padma Bhushan in the trade and industry category, the country’s third-highest civilian honor. The Asia Society gave him its Asia Game Changer Award in 2021.
Pichai is a U.S. citizen and lives in Los Altos Hills, California. He follows cricket and soccer.
Sources: Wikipedia entries on Sundar Pichai and Alphabet Inc.; Google’s blog author page for Pichai.
Dewey Albrecht covers the Port of Newport, commercial and sport fishing and the Yaquina Bay bar.
