SAN JOSE (TIP): Google’s Indian American CEO Sundar Pichai is joining parent company Alphabet’s board, according to an announcement on July 24 from the company.
“Sundar has been doing a great job as Google’s CEO, driving strong growth, partnerships, and tremendous product innovation. I really enjoy working with him and I’m excited that he is joining the Alphabet board,” said Larry Page, CEO of Alphabet, in a statement.
Formerly the Product Chief of Google, Pichai’s current role as CEO was announced on 10 August 2015, as part of the restructuring process that made Alphabet Inc. into Google’s parent company, and he assumed the position on 2 October 2015.
Pichai worked in engineering and product management at Applied Materials and in management consulting at McKinsey & Company.
Pichai joined Google in 2004, where he led the product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google’s client software products, including Google Chrome and Chrome OS, as well as being largely responsible for Google Drive. He went on to oversee the development of different applications such as Gmail and Google Maps. On 19 November 2009, Pichai gave a demonstration of Chrome OS and the Chromebook was released for trial and testing in 2011, and released to the public in 2012. On 20 May 2010, he announced the open-sourcing of the new video codec VP8 by Google, and introduced the new video format, WebM.
On 13 March 2013, Pichai added Android to the list of Google products that he oversees. Android was formerly managed by Andy Rubin. He was a director of Jive Software from April 2011 to 30 July 2013. Pichai was selected to become the next CEO of Google on 10 August 2015 after previously being appointed Product Chief by CEO, Larry Page. On 24 October 2015 he stepped into the new position at the completion of the formation of Alphabet Inc., the new holding company for the Google company family.