As tech giant Google grapples with its recent setback in the AI race to OpenAI and Microsoft and a wider downturn in big tech, numerous stakeholders are beginning to question if Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai is the right person to lead the company.
Chamath Palihapitiya, venture capitalist and tech investor, believes that stakeholders are writing off Pichai too soon. He added that he believes that Pichai has the right skill set to lead Google in the times to come.
While speaking on the hundred and twenty-sixth episode of the All In Podcast, Palihapitiya said, “I think he is a very capable person to run Google.”
“I think that he is the right person for the job. And I think what they have to do is just do the simple basic things right. It doesn't take a CEO change for a board of directors to authorize a 15 or 20 per cent reduction in workforce for a company,” Palihapitiya added.
The venture capitalist also pointed out that Google is in a relatively better financial position, as indicated by its latest earnings report.
“The company is so profitable. The problem is that it is clearly not yet humming on all cylinders. You don't need to go through all of this drastic change to do the simple obvious things,” said Palihapitiya.
Last week, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced its first-quarter earnings, beating both market and analyst expectations. The tech giant’s net income came in at $15.05 billion in the quarter under review. Operating income was at $17.41 billion in Q1 FY23.
The tech investor explained that major big tech is past its hyper-growth phase.
“Tech their valuations may still go up because they generate such an enormous amount of cash flow. But these are exactly those kinds of businesses now, they are ex-growth,” he said.
“I think it is time to just be reflective of the fact that these are some incredible companies, with ginormous cash flows, but now you've had this foundational platform shift which exposes the fact that they really aren't good at innovating,” Palihapitiya added.
The tech investor added that the biggest problem at major big tech is the lack of innovation in the past decade or so.“If you look at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, and ask yourself, when was the last hugely disruptive thing that they created. You're hard-pressed to find something that was even done in the 2010s,” he said.
He went on to give instances about the same. He said, “The iPhone for Apple iPhone was 2007. Microsoft was in the 1990s, Google was in 1998 with the search. Maybe there were Maps and Gmail in the 2000s. Facebook was the core service that we built in the 2000s, after that there has not been anything but acquisitions.”
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