Searching for Sundar Pichai
Mat Honan of BuzzFeed News did a fascinating piece on Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google.
My favorite parts about Sundar’s leadership style and who he is.
Leadership:
“When you think about the great leaders of Silicon Valley, they tend to fall broadly into one of three buckets: engineering, business, or product. The engineers drive innovation and invention. They make things work. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is the archetypical engineer, who built a company out of the hacker ethos. The business leaders are often the so-called disrupters. They reimagine supply and distribution, make deals in often cutthroat fashion, and corner markets. This is Apple’s Tim Cook, who pioneered supply chains in China and built the company into a financial juggernaut. The product types are those who can focus in on what makes something not just useful, but great and beautiful. They translate human engineering into humanity. Steve Jobs is the ultimate product guy. But running a massive company, like Facebook or Apple or Google, requires more than one of these skill sets…Pichai is clearly in the product camp.”
Who is Sundar Pichai?
“…in the end, this to me is Pichai. He is earnest and thoughtful and optimistic. Over the course of three months, I would spend time with him in India and Las Vegas and California. We spoke in convention centers, stadiums, conference rooms, cars, hotels, a palace, and his home. He never refused to answer a single question (although he did at a few points only answer off the record, or dodge). At one point he even let me see his daughter’s Christmas list (it was shockingly modest). He is a man fascinated by the future, whose conversations often come back to topics of theoretical science, the books he’s reading (Being Mortal, The Wright Brothers), and, generally speaking, big ideas. Yet he also delights in details, like the sound a camera shutter makes, or how long it takes a laptop to light up after opening. He seems to care more about the people who own Google’s products than the people who own its stock. (I never heard him mention shareholders, even in revenue discussions.) He is considerate. Nice. Kind, even. He loves cricket. And gadgets. And, very obviously, his children, whom he talks about constantly. He is a vegetarian. I know all these things about him. This is information. But is it giving us answers?…He dreamed of becoming a professional cricketer.”
Lastly, my wife and I visited Delhi for the first time in November 2015 for a wedding (incredible/beautiful experience). I feel Mat encapsulates our experience perfectly:
“Because despite the air in Delhi, a city where 10 million people lack clean water, despite the ever-present risk of terrorism and war, despite the poverty and overflowing population, India appears distinctly optimistic. It seems like a manifestation of the hope and excitement of the next billion not only coming online, but coming into power. It feels like a nation on the make.”
I am excited for what is to come.
Full BuzzFeed piece here.
