🇮🇳 Sundar Pichai

Pichai Sundararajan was born in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, in 1972, the son of an electrical engineer at GEC and a stenographer mother who quit work when the boys were small. The family slept on the living room floor; there was no television; the refrigerator arrived when Sundar was twelve. What he remembered later was not the absence of things but the patience required by it — a queue for the phone, a queue for the rickshaw, a queue for everything except books.

He read voraciously, scored at the very top in his class, and walked into the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur for metallurgical engineering with the easy gait of someone who had never failed an exam. His professors thought he would be a steel man. Instead, a Stanford scholarship in materials science and semiconductor physics pulled him to California in 1993 — a flight his father funded by borrowing more than his annual salary. Sundar landed in San Francisco with a single suitcase and slept on the floor of a friend's apartment for weeks.

After Stanford, the PhD plan dissolved. He joined Applied Materials, then went to the Wharton School for an MBA, and finally to McKinsey, where consulting bored him quickly. In 2004 — the week Gmail launched, on April 1, which everyone assumed was a joke — he interviewed at Google. Larry Page asked him what he thought of Gmail. He hadn't been able to try it. He winged the answer. They hired him anyway.

His first big project was the Google Toolbar, the unglamorous browser plug-in that quietly converted Internet Explorer users into Google searchers. From the Toolbar came the idea that became Chrome, the browser Pichai championed against the skepticism of nearly every senior executive at Google. Eric Schmidt thought browsers were a sucker's game. Pichai built it anyway. Chrome shipped in 2008. Within four years it was the most-used browser on Earth.

Android came next. When Andy Rubin departed under a cloud in 2013, Pichai inherited the operating system that runs 70 percent of the world's smartphones. He inherited Chrome OS, Google Apps, Maps, and eventually all of Google's product portfolio. In August 2015, when Page and Brin restructured the company into Alphabet, they handed Pichai the Google CEO title. In December 2019, when both founders stepped back from operations entirely, he took Alphabet too. He runs more compute than any human in history.

The Pichai era has not been quiet. He has shepherded the company through the Cambridge Analytica fallout, antitrust suits from the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission, employee walkouts over Project Maven and harassment cases, the launch of Bard and Gemini against an OpenAI insurgency, and a 12,000-person layoff in 2023 — the company's first mass cut. Critics call him cautious. His engineers call him the calmest person in the room at 2 a.m. when a launch is on fire.

He still lives modestly by tech-CEO standards in Los Altos Hills with his wife Anjali — they met at IIT — and their two children. He drives a Porsche but has been seen on the Stanford campus in a hoodie that has seen better decades. When Madurai elders telephoned in 2015 to congratulate him on the CEO appointment, he reportedly thanked them and asked about the monsoon.

Pichai's net worth is north of one billion dollars on paper, but the figure that matters to him, friends say, is the one his father quoted when he visited Mountain View for the first time: the cost of the international call to Stanford in 1993, compared to free Google Meet today.