Sundar Pichai: Unplugged and Listicalized
While everyone is talking about the profile of Sundar Pichai done by Buzzfeed, we give you its listiclized version
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Hey, you know what they say: in the digital world, curation is the best form of flattery!
While everyone on your Facebook and Twitter timeline is commenting on the sharp profile of Sundar Pichai done by Mat Honan on Buzzfeed, we are bringing to you a capsule read of the piece, listiclized, of course!
1. 404 Not Found
The man who has the world’s information at his fingertips could not trace his own grandmother during the Chennai floods in November last year when she was stuck on the second floor of a building, with no food or water.
2. The Middle-Class Scooter Boy
Now living in the lush Los Altos Area in California, in a house which, BTW, doesn’t look like the house of the highest-paid employee in the world – ya know, he has a 5 BHK (arrey, Antilia, Mukesh!) and just, like, a tennis court. But back in the day, he and his brother slept on the living room floor in their two-room house in Chennai (no biggie for middle-class Indian kids). Pichai boy also battled the winds on his father’s scooter on which the family of four used to travel together.
3. Pichai, an Einstein Fan Boy
Like all geeks, he too was excited when gravitational waves were detected, confirming Einstein’s theory. In a fan boy comment he said, “It’s a remarkable, mind-blowing thing, because Einstein wrote about this more than a hundred years ago – and it was all in his mind. One man, solo, doing that! I’ve been geeking out all morning on this trying to understand it. ”
Pichaisms
Sundar is a firm believer in quality. He says, “If you have to delay things to ship a quality product, delay.”
Pichai, the Unreasonable Boss
Sundar Pichai, the calm, smiling Sundar Pichai can step away from reasoning at times. When Google Cardboard was still being built, Pichai asked for it to be built in just eight-and-a-half weeks, a “sprint in developer cycle,” so that it could be unveiled at the company’s developer conference, Google IO in 2014.
That’s not all. When the cardboard viewers had been neatly packed in the gift bags along with T-shirts, etc., he changed the plan. He had all 10,000 of them removed from the bags as he worried people wouldn’t know what it was to be used for, and could even throw it away. He then went on to announce it first on stage and then handed them out to the audience in person after they left the keynote.
His Reading List Has Theoretical Science
Pichai is intrigued by the future, and his reading list comprises of books of theoretical science: Being Mortal, The Wright Brothers, etc.
P for Pichai, P for Product
If one were to categorise Sundar into the three broad categories in which Silicon Valley leaders fall: engineering ( a la Zuck); business (a la Apple’s Tim Cook with his pioneering supply chain in China and all) and product (Steve Jobs, duh), Pichai would fall in the product camp. Under him, Android, Chrome and Google Photos transformed. But in his new role as CEO, he is mastering other skills too.
True to His Roots, the Indian American Loves Cricket
Pichai can play cricket for hours. He is a vegetarian, and a doting father to two kids – a daughter, 13 and a son. And he is always smiling.
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