SUNDAR PICHAI:
Sundar Pichai is in some hot water. In fact, notable investors think that it’s
only a matter of time until Sundar either gets fired or is forced to resign. But wait a minute, wasn’t Sundar the golden
child of Google earning hundreds of millions per year, scaling the company from a successful
internet company to a tech giant, and nearly quintupling the stock price? Well, yes, Sundar did do all of that, but
when it comes to tech and high growth companies in general, you’re not judged based on past
performance. You’re judged based on future expectations
and future expectations for Sundar Pichai are at rock bottom. Google’s core products are slowly bleeding
marketshare, their workforce is more bloated than ever despite layoffs, and most importantly,
they’re completely dropping the ball when it comes to AI. And to make things worse for Sundar, Sergey
Brin, Google’s co-founder has unexpectedly come out of retirement. After completely falling of the face of the
planet back in 2015 and handing over the reigns to Sundar, Sergey made a surprise entrance
in mid 2023 to work on AI. More recently, Sergey made a rare public appearance
just to admit how bad of a job Google had done with Gemini. So, naturally, speculation regarding Sergey
replacing Sundar have gone wild as we’ve seen this time and time again with other stumbling
companies like Apple, Dell, Starbucks, Disney, and Twitter. But, how did we even get here? How did things get so bad so quickly for Google? And will Sundar Pichai actually be fired? Well, let’s find out. SUNDAR BREAKS IN:
To understand how we got here, we first have to take a look back at how Sundar became CEO
in the first place. If you read Sundar’s wikipedia page or business
publications, you’ll be shown a rosy story about a man who worked his way up from the
very bottom. The story goes that Sundar was born to a humble
middle class family in India back in June of 1972. And through pure grit and hard work, he was
able to make it into one of the most competitive colleges in the world IIT. For those of you who aren’t aware, IIT has
an acceptance rate of just 2.5%. For perspective, even Stanford and Harvard
have acceptance rates twice as high at 5%. And the funny thing is that Sundar would go
on to make it into Stanford as well where he got a masters in engineering before going
to UPenn and getting an MBA. So, little to say, Sundar had an extremely
stacked academic background, and in 2004, he would end up joining Google as VP of product
management of the Google Toolbar. From there, he would correctly identify that
toolbars as a whole were going extinct and convince Sergey and Larry to pursue an in
house browser that would go on to be a massive success. And it was due to this brilliant foresight
that Sundar was eventually made CEO of Google, or atleast that’s how the story goes. Now, let me first say that there is nothing
fundamentally inaccurate about this story. And nothing I’m about to say is meant to
take away from Sundar. Obviously, Sundar is one of the most accomplished
people in all of tech period, and you can’t really argue against that whether he stays
as Google’s CEO or not. But, with that being said, the problem with
this story is that it’s only told from one perspective: Sundar’s perspective. He worked hard, studied hard, achieved big,
and was rewarded. But the reality is that much of Sundar becoming
CEO had nothing to do with anything that he had control over. You can actually argue that he was just a
big cog in an even bigger machine and this dates all the way back to the day that he
was hired. When Sundar was hired, the CEO of Google was
a man named Eric Schmidt. This guy was neither a founder or early employee
of Google. He was actually an external executive recruit
that was put there by shareholders to keep Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey
Brin in check. Larry and Sergey got along with Eric but at
the same time, they also naturally felt that they knew what was best for Google and they
were constantly out to prove that. In fact, they were trying to do exactly that
on the literal day that Sundar was interviewed. As you might know, Sundar was interviewed
on the same day that Google launched Gmail. And Gmail was one of Larry and Sergey’s
first attempts at showing Eric and the world at large that Google could be a lot bigger
than just search. It was the same thing with the Android acquisition,
the YouTube acquisition, and the Google Maps acquisition. Oftentimes, Larry and Sergey wouldn’t even
tell Eric about these acquisitions until after the fact. Talk about a great executive dynamic. But anyway, while these acquisitions were
great, Larry and Sergey strongly felt that the real opportunity was going after the browser
market. Eric, however, was strongly opposed to this
idea. He felt that taking on Microsoft was too big
of a challenge and essentially forbid Larry and Sergey from pursuing the idea for 6 full
years. So, it’s not that Larry and Sergey pursued
chrome because Sundar gave them the idea. They already had the idea for years. They just didn’t have the authority or the
right man for the job. When Sundar approached them with a similar
idea though, they pounced on it. They basically just told Sundar to assemble
a team and develop Chrome without Eric knowing. And here’s Eric describing how exactly that
played out. Honestly pretty funny in retrospect, but unfortunately
for Eric, this was the end of the road. Larry and Sergey had brought several successful
products to market, including one that Eric opposed for years. So, this naturally brought into question Eric’s
judgement and cemented the founders as the true geniuses behind Google, allowing Larry
to win back the CEO position in 2011. This evolution made Sundar a part of the trusted
inner circle, but he was by no means in the running for CEO. Fate, however, had a completely different
idea. SUNDAR BECOMES CEO:
Now that Larry and Sergey had full control of the company again, they would really lean
into the moonshot projects that inspired them. Things like Google’s self driving car and
Google Glass. In fact, Larry wanted to make Google into
a mad scientist island that was constantly working on the next big thing. But, investors weren’t so gung ho about
this idea. Such visions simply painted Larry as a disconnected
billionaire founder that was lacking clarity and focus. To make things way worse, Larry’s voice
would literally give out. You see, Larry was struggling with voice problems
due to vocal chord paralysis since the early 2000s, and this would get especially bad in
the 2010s. If you’ve never heard Larry speak, this
is how he sounds. A clear testament to the idea that no amount
of money can solve certain issues. Anyway, Larry would begin skipping shareholder
meetings and presentations because he simply couldn’t speak which naturally put investors
on edge. Not only was Google being led by a seemingly
disconnected billionaire, but a person who struggled to even communicate their thoughts
and vision. The good news is that Google was founded by
2 guys, so Sergey could step up to the plate right? Well, no. Sergey would actually get caught up in an
affair which not only ruined his marriage and tarnished his reputation, but it also
destroyed his relationship with Larry. Apparently, Larry completely stopped talking
to Sergey after the affair came to light. Alright, so Sergey was no longer in the running
but there must be some other visionary executive at Google who could take the reigns right? Well, there was: Andy Rubin - the founder
of Android. Oh wait, never mind, Andy was caught up in
some serious misconduct allegations and was paid $90 million to leave Google as soon as
possible. So, you had an executive who missed Chrome
and a bunch of other stuff, a disconnected paralyzed founder, a founder with an affair,
and an executive with serious allegations. Talk about an inspiring executive team. At this point, it was clear that what Google
needed was not a revolutionary but someone that was uncontroversial. And that’s how Sundar actually became CEO. Of course, he worked really hard and achieved
great things, but what really knocked the final dominoes in his favor was circumstance. The 4 people who were actually in the running
for CEO: Eric, Larry, Sergey, and Andy were all forced out of the race in humiliating
manners. And the only person that was left in the inner
circle was the trusted ally who brought Chrome to market. And with that Sundar Pichai would become CEO
of Google on August 11, 2015. A few years later, he would get promoted to
be CEO of Alphabet as a whole leading us into his lack luster performance. SUNDAR DROPS THE BALL:
Ironically, you can’t fault Sundar for anything that he’s done or not done over the past
decade. The reality is that he did exactly what he
was hired to do which was lead Google as uncontroversially as possible and maximize revenue and profits. Since he tookover, Google’s revenue has
quadrupled, their net income has quintuped, and their stock has gone to the moon. The only problem is that that’s all that
Google has accomplished. I mean, can you even name a single big product
launch that Google has had since Sundar took over? The biggest launch I can think of is the Google
Pixel which is a phenomenal phone in terms of value, but not so great in terms of sales
and market share. In fact, the Pixel does not even control 1%
of the global smartphone market. Investors never had an issue with this lack
of innovation though as long as Google was still the market leader, but all of this changed
on November 30, 2022 when ChatGPT was released. All of sudden, investors wanted Google to
be able out innovate OpenAI who now also had backing from Microsoft. For obvious reasons, this was basically an
impossible task especially when the time constraint was ASAP. Nonetheless, Sundar would try to deliver,
launching Google Bard just a couple months later in March of 2023. Now, maybe, you could argue that Bard was
technically better than ChatGPT because it was connected to the internet or something
along those lines, but the reality was that no one really cared. Just look at this graph comparing ChatGPT
interest with Google Bard interest, it’s almost nonexistent. Whether Bard was actually a copy of ChatGPT
or not, that’s how the general public saw it, and they had no interest in using yet
another Google product. This was only made worse by the fact that
Google would botch the Bard release. An early Bard ad would show Bard giving factually
incorrect information, which is not surprising given how rushed they were to get Bard to
market. This mistake not only humiliated Bard and
Google but it also led to the company’s market value plummeting by $100 billion. This was strike 1 for Sundar. It was now up to him to fix Bard and that’s
what Google Gemini was supposed to be about. It was supposed to be Google’s AI redemption,
but Gemini would end up dropping the ball even worse than Bard. If you haven’t seen the social media memes
yet, Gemini basically had extreme “woke” bias. According to Gemini, this is George Washington,
these are popes, and these are British royalty. Yeah, this blunder has not only made Gemini
the laughing stock of the internet and lost the company another $96 billion in market
cap, but it has eliminated all shareholder confidence that Sundar can actually lead Google
into the age of AI. Combine this with the fact that Sergey is
back and that his affair drama has time to cool off and it’s not looking great for
Sundar. Historically, Sergey has always been in the
shadows of Larry, so it’s very possible that he’s interested in being the main character
this time. This isn’t to Sundar will be fired necessarily,
but he may very well have to take a role underneath Sergey if he’s not pushed out altogether. So, how exactly did Sundar end up in this
position? Well, despite his massive achievements, Sundar
was always a cog in an even bigger machine. That’s how we got the CEO Title. And as CEO, he gave shareholders exactly what
they asked for and shareholders simply realized that that’s not actually what they wanted,
and that’s why they want Sundar fired. AI isn’t the only realm in which Google
is reaching a deadend. They also have to address the increasingly
concerning issue of market saturation. Check out this video to learn more.
