Sunder Pichai unveils the secret, of how he is innovating within a huge company of 180K employees
Sunder Pichai recently faced controversies over the features of Gemini, but Pichai remains bullish after all these controversies. Handling a big innovative team of 180k staff is not an easy task. But Sunder Pichai, the CEO of tech giant Google is passionately handling his team.
Recently, Sunder Pichai visited Stanford Graduate School of Business and there he revealed the secret of how Sundar Pichai is innovating within a huge company. When the interviewer asked him how he was handling the team of 180K employees beating all the startups who are trying to be a big competition for their businesses. Is Pichai worried about this thing and how he handles the situations?
Sunder Pichai replied to their question saying, “Honestly, it’s a question which has always kept me up at night through the years,”
He continued saying, “One of the inherent characteristics of technology is you can always develop something amazing with a small team from the outside. And history has shown that. The scale doesn’t always give you — regulators may not agree, but at least running the company, I’ve always felt you’re always susceptible to someone in a garage with a better idea. So I think, I think how do you as a company move fast?
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How do you have a culture of risk-taking? How do you incent that? These are all things that you actually have to work at a lot. I think at least larger organizations tend to default. One of the most counter-intuitive things I’ve seen is, that the more successful things are, the more risk-averse people become. It’s so counter-intuitive. You would often find smaller companies almost make decisions that bet the company, but the bigger you are, it’s true for large universities, it’s true for a large company, you have a lot more to lose, or you perceive you have a lot more to lose. And so you find you don’t take as many ambitious risk-taking initiatives. So you have to consciously do that. You have to push teams to do that.”
Additionally, he pointed out the Google example when the company was willing to experiment with new technologies in the past. “We recently said, we went back to a notion we had in early Google of Google Labs…How can you put out something in the easy way, the lighter-weight way? How do you allow people to prototype more easily internally and get it out to people?”
Apart from this Sunder Pichai was also excited about the key features of Gemini and highlighted those features during his interview at Stanford. Firstly he highlighted the features of Gemini, to process different types of data including audio and video. Secondly, he put his thoughts on how the LLM models are handling tackling the complex problems beyond information retrieval.
