The Sundar Also Rises

FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS IN INDIA TO ONE OF THE TECH WORLD’S MOST INFLUENTIAL LEADERS, GOOGLE AND ALPHABET CEO SUNDAR PICHAI’S VISION TO DEMOCRATISE TECHNOLOGY IS VERY CLOSE TO HIS HEART.

- Stephen Corby

Effectively you already give this man access to your thoughts, interests and even your deepest secrets. You use his products every day and thus increase his already staggering profits and, if you’ve bought one of his nifty intelligent assistants, some people believe he’s listening to every word you say. So why isn’t Pichai Sundararajan more frightening?

Surely the boss of a company that’s not only in all of our pockets but our bedrooms as well, and that’s working on artificial intelligence that could, in theory, destroy all mankind, should have a more intimidating aura – think the Rupert Murdoch-like bad guy from the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, or at least Steve Jobs.

Sundar Pichai, as he’s more commonly known, is the CEO of one of the companies that have most deeply affected your everyday life over the past decade or more, and he’s a man whose rise to the top – from humble beginnings in India – has been so meteoric it’s a wonder he doesn’t have a little tail of fire following him around.

And yet, the words you most often hear describing him are “low key”, “compassionate”, “humble” and, most common of all, “thoughtful”.

Indeed, when he took over as CEO in 2015, in his early 40s, one Google employee was quoted as saying, “All the arseholes have left.”

Pichai, now 47, once took the time to personally write an encouraging reply to a letter from a seven-year-old girl asking for a job at his company because she liked the sound of all the free stuff, and slippery slides, in its offices. And he recently congratulated another young woman on Twitter for a post about how she got a zero on her first physics test, but stuck with it and is now a published astrophysicist.