Alphabet Google’s New Parent Company, names New CEO – Sundar Pichai, Everything You Need to Know
Google announced a corporate restructuring on Monday, forming an umbrella company called Alphabet and naming a new CEO to the core business of Google. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will run Alphabet — Page as CEO and Brin as president. The company, which was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, announced its new operating structure in a blog post on Monday called “G is for Google.”They also said that Sundar Pichai is taking over as CEO of Google.Alphabet will continue to trade under the GOOGL (GOOGL, Tech30) and GOOG (GOOG) ticker symbols when the change kicks in later this year.There’s already a new Alphabet website, abc.xyz, which includes a hidden link to the fictional Hooli.xyz website from the HBO comedy Silicon Valley.
Sundar Pichai: He’s the company’s first non-white CEO
Born in Chennai, India, Pichai will be the first CEO of Google that isn’t a white man. He studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur and came to America to study materials science and semiconductor physics at Stanford, though he eventually dropped out. He’ll join Microsoft chief Satya Nadella as one of the few minority CEOs in Silicon Valley.
He’s the reason you’re using Google Chrome
Pichai started at Google in 2004 working on the search toolbar that the company puts in Internet browsers. He thought that Google should have its own browser, even though the company was still mainly known for its search engine. Pichai eventually spearheaded the creation of Chrome, which has surpassed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the most popular browser in the U.S. The Chrome brand has since expanded to include a successful line of laptops and streaming devices.
He’s Larry Page’s right-hand man
Page has increasingly relied on Pichai since starting his second stint as Google’s CEO in 2011. Last year’s restructuring had already made Pichai’s unofficial No. 2. Now Page will have even more time to focus on Google’s other big bets while Pichai manages the company’s core competencies. “Sundar has been saying the things I would have said (and sometimes better!) for quite some time now, and I’ve been tremendously enjoying our work together,” Page said in the blog post announcing Alphabet. “I know he deeply cares that we can continue to make big strides on our core mission to organize the world’s information.”
He’s a unifier within the company
With more than 55,000 employees, getting the different divisions within Google to play nice together is an ongoing challenge. Pichai seems to have a knack for it. Since taking over Android he’s made big strides with Google Now by creating interdisciplinary teams from the company’s Android and search departments. “I would challenge you to find anyone at Google who doesn’t like Sundar or who thinks Sundar is a jerk,” Googler Caesar Sengupta told Businessweek.