Who is Sundar Pichai: the Google CEO overseeing the layoff of 12,000 staff at the Silicon Valley titan?

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has announced that they will be laying off 12,000 members of staff from Google in a bid to “set [Alphabet] up for the future.” That comment was made by Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who wrote about the move in a blog post early Friday morning (January 20).

In his post, Pichai stated that “This will mean saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with. I’m deeply sorry for that. The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.”

Pichai also mentioned that several Google employees would have already received an email regarding the loss of their role in the United States, while international employees are set to play a waiting game.

The layoffs by Alphabet once again show a rocky time in Silicon Valley, with Twitter CEO Elon Musk causing a firestorm when he announced many layoffs when taking over the social media platform, with some Twitter employees camped outside their offices waiting to know if they still had a job or not.

Pichai’s ascension from materials engineer to the head of the ubiquitous Google and Alphabet has seen the 50-year-old earn accolades with Time Magazine naming him in their list of 100 influential people on two separate occasions (2016 and 2020), with the CEO at one stage viewed as a potential candidate as Microsoft CEO in 2014.

But throughout the accolades also came bushfires regarding Google’s privacy policy, leading to a U.S. Congressional testimony, alongside an equity award tying his pay to that of the company’s performance in December 2022. Peopleworld takes a look at the life of Sundar Pichai, who currently is facing questions over the announcement of layoffs with the Silicon Valley giant.

Family life and early beginnings

Born June 10 1972 in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India, Sundar Pichai was born to his mother Lakshmi, a stenographer, and father Regunatha who was an electrical engineer at GEC, the British conglomerate. Pichai also has a younger brother, Srinivasan Pichai, who has also found success in a leadership role, acting as Associate Director at BDO Global Accounting Company.

Despite the careers of his parents, reports have mentioned the humble life Pichai had growing up. No television in the house, no car outside, these were elements that Pichai still retains to this day regarding the value of items and how many take these commodities for granted.

Pichai earned a degree from IIT Kharagpur in metallurgical engineering while going on to hold an M.S. from Stanford University in materials science and engineering, and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was named a Siebel Scholar and a Palmer Scholar, respectively.

During a virtual graduation ceremony in 2020, Pichai recalled to the graduating class of Stanford University that “my father spent the equivalent of a year’s salary on my plane ticket to the US so I could attend Stanford,” showing the high hopes his family had - hopes that he would certainly achieve during his tenure at Google.

It was while in college that Pichai met a female student named Anjali, who was part of the same group joining IIT Kharagpur at the same time. It would be young love that to this day endures the passages of time, as the pair married and have two children: a son named Kiran and a daughter named Kavya

Joining Google

Pichai worked in engineering and product management at Applied Materials and in management consulting at McKinsey & Company, before joining Google on April 1 2004 (the same day Google introduced Gmail) and becoming involved in the project management side of the company. One of Pichai’s first ideas was the concept of a Google web browser that would implement their search engine as the main means of scouring the internet for information.

The browser was pitched to then-Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, who liked the idea; Google Chrome is now one of the most used internet browsers since its release in 2008. Pichai was also on hand to oversee the development of several Google apps, including Gmail, Google Drive and ChromeOS - the latter leading to the creation of the now University standard Chromebook devices.

The rapid success of apps that would become the daily norm for many people (Gmail, Google’s office suite) led Pichai to become a highly regarded mind in Silicon Valley, one that led to offers from other companies in an attempt to poach one of Google’s masterminds.

Links to Microsoft and becoming Google CEO

Despite his continued successes with Google, it wasn’t all smooth sailing at the tech giant; in 2011 Pichai was set to leave his role at Google and become part of the leadership team with Twitter. This led to Google then making a renewed deal to keep him on board which included $50 million USD worth of stock options to keep him on board. Quite clearly, Google had big plans for the humble Pichai.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft were also interested in hiring Pichai for leadership roles, with Microsoft viewed as a dead certainty for him to take the vacant CEO role in 2014, which ultimately went to Satya Nadella.

Pichai was selected to become the next CEO of Google on August 10, 2015, after previously being appointed Product Chief by CEO, Larry Page. On October 24, 2015, he stepped into the new position after the formation of Alphabet Inc., the new holding company for the Google company family

Google Manifesto controversy

Pichai’s first public controversy came in August 2017, when a Google employee was fired for publishing a manifesto questioning the company’s diversity policies. The memo, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” argued that the low number of women in technical positions was a result of biological differences instead of discrimination.

The memo contained a myriad of gender stereotypes — like the notion that women are less interested in high-stress jobs because they are more anxious — to rationalise the gender gap in the tech industry. The memo quickly spread outside the company, as other Google employees railed against many of its assumptions. It left Pichai with a difficult decision: despite Google’s culture of openness in the workplace, the company was still criticised for that it has not done enough to hire and promote women and minorities.

Pichai made his decision, firing the staff member and sending a company-wide email to its employees stating portions of the memo had violated the company’s code of conduct and crossed the line “by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”

Appearance before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee

Then there was Pichai’s cooperation with the US House Judiciary Committee, who were looking into several issues with the tech giant, including allegations of political bias on the platform, a version of their search engine in China that would censor sites deemed inappropriate by the country’s Central Government (leading to the term “The Great Firewall of China”) and many concerns over Google’s privacy policies.

During his response, Pichai informed the committee that Google employees cannot influence search results. He also stated that Google users can opt out of having their data collected and that "there are no current plans for a censored search engine" in China.

Pichai was once again summoned by the US government, this time by the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation which unanimously voted in favour to subpoena Pichai, along with the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter, to testify before the committee in response to lawmakers' concerns over the technology industry's exemption from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1934.

Section 230 provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an "interactive computer service" who publish information provided by third-party users.

Performance to pay award and mass layoffs “a difficult decision”

Upon the announcement that Google will need to lay off 12,000 employees to ensure the future of the tech giant, some people looked to an announcement made in December 2022 when Google announced their CEO would receive “a new equity award [...] that ties more of his pay to performance.”

Pichai, who is given an equity award every three years, was granted two tranches of PSUs with a target value of $63 million each. The CEO was also given a grant of $84 million in the form of Alphabet's restricted stock units, leading some in the tech community to cry foul over the news of the layoffs.

In his blog post regarding the layoffs, Pichai also mentioned “we’ve undertaken a rigorous review across product areas and functions to ensure that our people and roles are aligned with our highest priorities as a company. The roles we’re eliminating reflect the outcome of that review. They cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions.”

Whether those layoffs pertain to the potential of increased performance at Google, which would exponentially increase the wealth of Pichai ($131 million USD), is the cause celebre that Pichai currently finds himself to contend with.