The dastardly Mr Deedes Big Shot of the week
SUNDAR PICHAI, 46 GOOGLE CHIEF EXECUTIVE
THE softly spoken fellow sat before the US Congress this week wasn’t overly impressive, it must be said. Shy, gawky, he spoke with the confidence of a shifty adolescent trying to convince a barman to serve him his first pint.
His suit, clearly not his everyday uniform, hung so awkwardly from his gangly frame one couldn’t help suspect that he had been involuntarily yanked into it by an assistant following hours of fruitless negotiation.
But then Sundar Pichai is not a man who particularly needs to impress anyone. As chief executive of Google, he’s arguably one of America’s most influential business leaders, and certainly one of its most profitable.
The tech firm, whose parent company Alphabet is the largest in the world, made nearly £9bn last year. Pichai’s own take-home pay was just shy of £200m.
When author Tom Wolfe coined the term Masters of the Universe, it was the Wall Street power brokers who were the business world’s kingpins. Today, it’s all about the FAANGs – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. These are the companies which don’t just power the US economy. They now pretty much run the world.
PiCHAi’S firm knows the clothes you buy, the videos you watch, the recipes you like and goodness knows what else you’ve already searched for this morning.
Do those political blowhards who were grilling him up this week on data privacy believe they are powerful? Next to this indian brainiac they barely know the meaning of the word.
Born into a middle-class family, Pichai grew up in an apartment in the southern indian city of Chennai. Living space chez Pichai was rather limited.
He and his brother had to sleep on the living room floor.
Pichai’s parents both worked – his father an electrical engineer, mother a stenographer – but life was far from idyllic. The neighbourhood suffered droughts, which Pichai said gives him anxiety to this day. He never sleeps without a bottle of water by his bed.
As an infant, the family had no car, fridge or telephone. When they acquired the latter two items when Pichai was teenager, he witnessed first-hand how technology could transform lives for the better.
At school he was a bright pupil and captain of the cricket team. He was a chess whizz too. After Pichai won a scholarship to Stanford, his father drained the family savings to buy him his air ticket to California. it was there at University he met his wife Anjali. He proposed in their final year.
He started out working at McKinsey as a consultant before joining Google in 2004, working on its search engine. His reputation there grew after he and a group of fellow engineers designed the web browser Chrome. Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were sceptical at first, reluctant to take on Microsoft’s mighty internet Explorer.
Pichai, convinced them otherwise. Today, Chrome accounts for about 60pc of the market.
When he was promoted in 2013 to head Android, Google’s smartphone software, it appeared to be only a matter of time before he was pushing for the top job.
Two years later, when Page and Brin decided to restructure their creation, forming parent company Alphabet, the Google corner office was handed to Pichai.
The job comes with its fair share of political headaches. Complaints about Google down the years include aggressive tax avoidance, data harvesting and its duopoly of digital advertising with Facebook, which has left the struggling newspaper industry on its knees.
There was also a recent walkout of Google staff around the world in protest at the way it had handled accusations of sexual harassment.
Pichai seems an earnest enough fellow. in common with all Faangsters – Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg – public criticism of the firm tends to be met almost with a meek, butterwouldn’t-melt shoulder shrug.
After years avoiding the spotlight, his appearance in Washington this week was the first time he’s testified publicly.
it is almost as if these tech guys have trouble understanding what accountability means. Perhaps they should try Googling it.