Sundar Pichai during an interview with TOI said “We want to always work on ambitious things and by definition, we won’t succeed in everything. If we do, we are not being ambitious enough”.
“If You Don’t Fail Sometimes, You’re not being ambitious enough”: Sundar Pichai
Sudar Pichai who is the CEO of Google has hardly changed since August 2015, when he was given a responsibility of running the world’s second most valuable company. Rapid changes and new innovations are the mantras of the tech giant that he heads. So, you must be thinking what he’s betting on in the start of a new year?
Well, Sundar Pichai shares some open up his mind and told Times Of India “Last year was a big one for us. We focused sharply on machine learning and artificial intelligence and how we can use it to make our services better. We think of this as an important inflection point. We brought out products like Google Assistant and Google Home. Pixel (Google’s smartphone) also has the assistant built in. I view that as a foundation for how we will think about things for the next many years,”
Well, we all know that Google is the most dominating search engine, their social media initiatives like Google+, Buzz and Wave haven’t performed much well as expected. Well on this view Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said “We want to always work on ambitious things and by definition, we won’t succeed in everything. If we do, we are not being ambitious enough”
“If we meet 70% of our objectives, we consider that a success, To me, what’s more, important is, are we continuing to innovate? Are we at the forefront of applying computer science to solve problems for our users, consistent with our mission? I think we do that, and we have to do that in the future too.”
Sundar Pichai believes that Google’s real-time automatic translation feature to be available within five years. This will break down language barriers in communication and will be very helpful in India.
When he was asked about government’s big digital push through he said “Big platform shifts tend to have enormous effects. Just because people have phones and phones have location built into them…they can have things like ride-sharing and the whole transportation industry changes. That’s because of a platform shift. So I won’t underestimate it”
“These things can have tremendous multiplicative effects for a place like India. This country has a chance to leapfrog some things other countries have struggled with.We’re doing it with cell phones instead of landlines. Similarly, in digital payments, the UPI stack in India is phenomenal.”
“Something like that doesn’t exist in most countries. I do think we have a unique opportunity. There is a lot more infrastructure here than people realise. The foundations have been set for digitising India on the payment side as well. I am not an expert on this. But I think it is a courageous move and from Google’s perspective, if there is anything we can do to help, we would be glad to do so.”
When Sundar Pichai was asked how often he meets Google’s co-founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin he said “I see them every week. And they haven’t changed at all.”
Sundar Pichai added “They’re always pushing me and everyone else hard to make sure that we are working on really ambitious things so that we make a difference for users. They are very committed to the values we share as a company. They always make sure we stay true to our core mission and ideals. They help me do my job well, my exchanges with them are always a big part of how I think about what to do.I value that a lot,”
When he was asked whether co-founders have set him any golden rules on how to run Google, he said “This is a partnership I have with them….(there are) no rules as such…I’ve worked with them long enough that we share the same goals. We have had crazy debates and arguments about specific product ideas. But never on values and ideals.”
When he was asked about his busy schedule how he manages time in all this he replied “I definitely want to spend as much of my time as possible on people building things. So, I strive to increase the time I spend working with engineers, product managers, and designers to build things. I wish I could spend 90% of my time on that. I obviously don’t, but I always strive to be closer to that.”
So, these are all things Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during an interview with Times of India. What do you think about Sundar Pichai? Share your views in the comment box below.
