India-born Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Google on Tuesday by company’s founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin in the course of a reorganization that created a mother company called Alphabet.
The move made Pichai, 43, yet another India-born officer to lead a major global technology corporation after Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.
According to a blog post by co-founder Larry Page, Google will now become a “slimmed-down” company and be part of Alphabet Inc. along with ventures “far afield of our main internet products”.
Mr Pichai is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, Stanford University and The Wharton School. He will be a “key part” of the new structure that will “allow us to keep the tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside Google”, Mr Page said.
“I feel very fortunate to have someone as talented as he is to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations,” he said.
For Chennai-born Sundar Pichai, becoming CEO comes 11 years after he joined Google following a stint at management consultancy McKinsey and Company.
At Google, he started out with heading products such as the company’s new web browser Chrome and later most of Google’s consumer software portfolio including the Android operating system.
“Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity),” Mr Page said.
He said the move would make Google “cleaner and more accountable”. Alphabet, meanwhile, will be run by Mr Page as CEO and Google co-founder Sergey Brin as President.
Reiterating a line from a founders’ letter 11 years ago, Mr Page who started the company with his partner Sergey Brin as a research project at Stanford, said, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.”
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