Pichai Sundararajan, better known as Sundar Pichai is an Indian-American business executive who currently serves as the CEO of Google LLC and its parent company Alphabet Inc.
Pichai was born on June 10, 1972 at Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India.. His mother, Lakshmi, was a stenographer, and his father, Regunatha Pichai, was an electrical engineer at GEC, the British conglomerate. He completed schooling in Jawahar Vidyalaya Senior Secondary School in Ashok Nagar, Chennai and completed Class XII from Vana Vani school at IIT Madras. He then studied at IIT Kharagpur in metallurgical engineering. Moving to the United States, he attained an M.S. from Stanford University in materials science and engineering and further attained an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was named a Siebel Scholar and a Palmer Scholar, respectively.
Pichai showed an early interest in technology and an exceptional memory, particularly for phone numbers. Cricket and football are two of his favorite pastimes.
On December 19, 2003, he wed Anjali Pichai. Sundar and Anjali were in the same class and from the same batch. Kiran Pichai is their son, and Kavya Pichai is their daughter.
Pichai joined Google as the head of product management and development in 2004. He first worked on the Google Toolbar, which allowed users of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox to easily access the Google search engine.
He was directly involved in the development of Google’s own browser, Chrome, which was released to the public in 2008 and eventually became the world’s most popular web browser over the next few years. Pichai was named vice president of product development the same year, and he began to take a more active public role.
In 2014, he was mentioned as a possible Microsoft CEO, but in both cases, he was given large financial packages to stay with Google. He was also said to have helped Google negotiate its $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest Labs in 2014. As a result, when Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced the formation of Alphabet Inc. in August 2015, industry insiders were not surprised when Pichai was named CEO of Google, which was reorganized as a subsidiary. He was also named Alphabet’s CEO in December 2019.
In December 2017, Pichai was a speaker at the World Internet Conference in China, where he stated that “a lot of work Google does is to help Chinese companies. Many small and medium-sized businesses in China use Google to get their products to customers in countries other than China.
In 2022, Pichai received the Padma Bhushan from the Government of India, its third-highest civilian award.
Sundar says ‘India is a part of me, I carry it wherever I go’.
He was named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” in 2016 and 2020.
Sundar Pichai’s corporate journey has been defined by his leadership and innovation at Google, as well as his role as CEO of Google and Alphabet Inc. in shaping the future of technology.
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