Leader of Google and man in charge of Alphabet. Presiding over a technology giant is not a fluke for sundar pichai, an indian engineer who he went from a strict humility in his childhood to become CEO of one of the most important companies in the world.
Sundar is living proof of the American dream: he was born in Madurai (Madras or Chennai), Tamil Nadu, India, in 1972. He grew up in a house without a fridge or television, but he wanted to change the reality in which he lived with a scholarship to study in USA.
Count the BBC that Pichai Sundarararajan, his full name, seemed destined to be a great professional cricketer. He was team captain at his school, with which he won several regional competitions. However, growing up he became interested in engineering.
He studied metallurgical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, a city in West Bengal, in the east of the country. Pichai was “the brightest of his generation”, according to the words of his tutors to Times of India. But then technology seduced him.
The leap into technology
After graduating with an engineering degree, Pichai was offered a scholarship to Stanford University in California. His trip to the United States cost more than the annual salary of his father, key in his path to the tech world.
According to a Bloomberg profile, Pichai’s origins are humble: his family lived in a two-bedroom house and he had to sleep in the living room with his younger brother. They had no refrigerator, television, or car..
The father of the CEO of Google, Regunatha Pichai, worked in the British conglomerate General Electric Company (not to be confused with General Electric in the United States). He told the economic outlet that his son had a natural talent for remembering phone numbers.
“I used to come home and tell him a lot about my day at work and the challenges I faced.”, declared the proud father, inspiration of the successful son.
Arrival at Google in 2004
Sundar Pichai joined Google in 2004 and has put his talents at the service of the company ever since. He was behind the development of Google Chrome and the Android operating systemalthough curiously he did not have a cell phone until he was 12 years old. Since 2015 he is CEO of Google.
On Google, Pichai is described as a well-liked man with delicate forms. He is also very popular among developers, hosting the I/O, the developer event for the big G, every year. So far, His mandate is summed up in some of Google’s main products in the area of research, advertising and navigation.
As for his personal life, Pichai is married to his college sweetheart, Anjali, a chemical engineer, with whom he has two children: Kiran and Kavya. Together they live in a house in Los Altos Hills (California), the fourth population with the highest median income in the US, according to Bloomberg.