In a major overhaul of Google, Chennai-born Sundar Pichai has been named the new CEO of the American technological giant that will now become the key subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., a newly-created overarching holding company that will be run by Google co-founders larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The 43-year-old Pichai, an alumnus of IIT-Kharagpur, Stanford University and Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has been a glittering star in the Google firmament since he joined the Internet search giant in 2004, helped launch its hugely-popular Chrome web browser four years later and was put in charge of the Android mobile operating system in 2013.
Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. The company’s two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGl and GOOG.
The new Google itself, under Pichai, will have Search, Advertising, Maps, YouTube and Android.
“Sergey and I have been super excited about Pichai’s progress and dedication to the company. And it is clear to us and our Board that it is time for Sundar to be CEO of Google,” Page wrote in a blog unfolding the massive corporate restructuring plan that took Wall Street by surprise.
Page, who will be the CEO of Alphabet with Brin as its president, went on to say that he felt “very fortunate to have someone as talented as he (Pichai) is to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations”.
According to a Bloomberg report, Pichai hails from a middle class family of Chennai and his mother worked as a stenographer before she had children; his father, Regunatha Pichai, was an electrical engineer for the British conglomerate GEC and managed a factory that made electrical components.
“I used to come home and talk to him a lot about my work day and the challenges I faced,” recalls Regunatha Pichai. “Even at a young age, he was curious about my work. I think it really attracted to him to technology.”
The family of four lived in a two-room apartment, with Sundar and his younger brother sleeping in the living room. During much of his childhood, the Pichais didn’t have a television or a car.
For transportation, the choice was either the crowded city buses or the family’s blue lambretta scooter.
The Pichais got their first telephone, a rotary, when Sundar was 12. The phone revealed to him the magical conveniences of technology, as well as an unusual gift: He could remember every number he ever dialed. “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.”
Pichai excelled at school and won a coveted spot at the IIT-Kharagpur, where he studied engineering. After graduating, he won an additional scholarship to Stanford University to study materials science and semiconductor physics, says the Bloomberg report.
Another report claimed that in 2011, Google offered Pichai $50 million in stocks in order to retain him in the face of Twitter’s aggressive bid to tap him as its product head.
The slimming of Google notwithstanding, the company will remain the centre of the Alphabet universe and its undisputed cash cow. Google, as Page put it, is “making all sorts of new products”. He spoke of the “amazing progress” of the recently-launched Google Photos and Google Now.
“I know Sundar will always be focused on innovation, continuing to stretch boundaries. I know he deeply cares that we can continue to make big strides on our core mission to organize the world’s information,” Page noted, adding: “I have been spending quite a bit of time with Sundar, helping him and the company in any way I can, and I will of course continue to do that.”
Alphabet, as the parent company and Silicon Valley behemoth, will be a lot more. In recent years, Google’s activity had broadened into areas far beyond its core Internet operations. These included drones, pharmaceuticals, venture capital et al. Unlike the Google core of web operations, these excursions have not been all that promising, but Page and Brin are determined to expand their innovations orbit.
“For Sergey and me this is a very exciting new chapter in the life of Google, the birth of Alphabet,” Page wrote, recalling what the two of them had written years ago: “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.”
“From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have,” he wrote, adding: “We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. And we haven’t stopped there. We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about.”
Now Alphabet, as a collection of companies with Google as the largest one, will push ahead on that path. It will encompass Calico, an anti-aging biotech company; Sidewalk, a company focused on smart cities; Nest, a maker of Internet-connected devices for the home; Fiber, high-speed Internet service in a number of American cities; X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, the drone delivery effort. It will also include investment arms, such as Google Ventures and Google Capital.