Sundar Pichai: the little-known Android exec from India who now runs Google

One of Sundar Pichai’s clearest memories of growing up in Chennai, India, involves picking up the results of a blood test for one of his parents. It was the early 1980s, and though the family lived in a middle-class neighbourhood, they didn’t have a telephone, automobile or television. There was no way to get the results other than retrieve them in person.

Pichai had to take a city bus two and a half hours across town to the hospital and wait in a long line. When the results weren’t ready, he returned home empty-handed. In the US, "technology happens so fast, change is more continuous for people and sometimes they don’t internalise it," he said in a Bloomberg Businessweek interview in 2014.

"For me, it happened in these discrete moments."

From that relatively hard-scrabble upbringing (his family got around by piling onto a Lambretta scooter,) Pichai attended the Indian Institute of Technology, won a scholarship to Stanford University, worked at the early Silicon Valley blue chip Applied Materials and joined Google as a product manager working on the toolbar, an important early window into Google’s services that appeared on the top of Web browsers like Internet Explorer.

That was 10 years ago. On Monday, Pichai, 43, was tapped to be chief executive officer of Google itself, the dominant unit of the new holding company Alphabet, a stunningly rapid ascent to the top echelon of US business. Now comes the hard part. His new role will be about positioning Google for the future, which hands him some of the toughest jobs in all of tech -- like shifting the profit engine from the desktop to mobile and combating the rapid growth of Amazon.com in e-commerce and cloud computing and Facebook in social networking.

"The challenge is how to sustain revenue growth and profit enhancement in the face of slowing search growth," said Brian Wieser, a senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group LLC.