Chennai-born Google CEO Sundar Pichai once revealed that his father spent money equivalent to his one-year salary on a flight ticket so that he could study at Stanford. Now, Pichai's net worth has reached an estimated $1 billion (Rs 8342 crore), placing him among the small group of non-founder tech CEOs to achieve billionaire status.
At YouTube's Dear Class of 2020 virtual ceremony, Pichai talked about the struggles that he and his family had to face in his early days. He stated, “My father spent the equivalent of a year's salary on my plane ticket to the US so I could attend Stanford. It was my first time ever on a plane," Pichai said, adding that the only thing that got him to where he is today, other than luck, was his passion for technology and an open mind. This was the time when everyone, including students were trapped in their homes due to the coronavirus.
The Google CEO urged students to "be open, be impatient, be hopeful" enunciating that "if you can do that, history will remember the Class of 2020 not for what you lost, but for what you changed. You have the chance to change everything. I am optimistic you will."
He further told, “I grew up without much access to technology. We didn't get our first telephone till I was ten. I didn't have regular access to a computer until I came to America for graduate school. And, our television, when we finally got one, only had one channel.”
Now it has been over 20 years for Pichai working at Google. In terms of education, he finished his metallurgical engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and then pursued MS material science and engineering from Stanford University, followed by an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Sundar Pichai has today i.e. June 10, turned 52 years old. He was born to Regunatha Pichai, an electrical engineer, and Lakshmi, a stenographer back in 1972. He has often talked about how he grew up in a two-room apartment in Chennai where he and his younger brother slept on the living-room floor. The Pichais didn’t have a television or a car, at times, they didn’t even have running water. A rotary telephone his father got when Pichai was 12 introduced him to technology.