Sundar Pichai turns 45 today. The Google CEO, whose full name is Pichai Sundararajan has come a long way from being a quiet and soft spoken Chennai boy to someone who is leading one of the largest and perhaps the most well-known company in the world. Pichai’s parents, his father is an electrical engineer and his mother a stenographer, raised him in a typical middle-class environment. His parents probably found out that their son was a genius when they noticed that he has excellent memorising skills. They found that he could remember all the numbers that he had dialled on the family’s rotary landline phone. Apart from being a mnemonic wizard, Pichai was also the captain of his school’s cricket team – so much for that old theory that only nerds can turn into techies.
Pichai who, as you would have guessed, has a love for technology and earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. The Google CEO has also attended other premier educational institutes and has earned an MS degree from Stanford University and holds an MBA degree from the elite Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Pichai worked at Applied Materials and McKinsey & Company before joining Google in 2004. Both Twitter and Microsoft have tried to poach Pichai but he has stayed loyal to Google. Pichai had joined Google to lead product management for Google Chrome and Chrome OS. The CEO has also worked on other Google projects such as Gmail, Google Maps and Google Drive. Incidentally, Pichai was interviewed by Google on the same day on which Gmail was launched.