Sundar Pichai

He is married to Anjali Pichai, and is the father of two children.

He was born as Pichai Sundararajan on July 12, 1972, in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India. His father, Regunatha Pichai, worked as an electrical engineer for the British conglomerate GEC and managed a factory that made electrical components. His mother used to be a stenographer before having children. He has one brother.

Pichai grew up in a middle-class home and was a bright student. He excelled academically at his school, Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan, and earned a seat in the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, one of the most prestigious engineering institutions in India.

He did his B.Tech in Metallurgical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur and then won a scholarship to study materials science and semiconductor physics from Stanford University from where he eventually earned his M.S.

He initially planned to pursue a Ph.D. from Stanford and embark on an academic career. However, he dropped out and joined Applied Materials—a Silicon Valley semiconductor maker—as an engineer and product manager. He did not work there for long.

He went on to complete his MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (2002), where he was named a Siebel Scholar and a Palmer Scholar.

Following the completion of his MBA he was appointed as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company.

He joined Google in 2004. Initially he worked on Google’s search toolbar as a part of a small team. The toolbar gave users of Internet Explorer and Firefox easy access to Google search.

He also worked on other Google products like Google Gears and Google Pack. The success of Google’s toolbar gave Pichai the idea that Google should develop its own browser. He discussed his idea with his seniors and faced an objection from then-CEO Eric Schmidt, who thought that developing a browser would be a too expensive affair.

An engineering genius known for his innovative ideas, Sundar Pichai is best known as the mastermind behind the launch of the Chrome browser in 2008. He played a pivotal role in convincing his seniors at Google to launch the browser which in time became the most popular browser on the internet and also led to the launch of the Chrome operating system.