Biography | Sundar Pichai — The Mountain View Campus Where Page Handed Him Google

People treat a Google succession as a stage keynote with a new product behind the speaker.

This one was a blog post.

On 10 August 2015 Larry Page published the plan to put Google under a new holding company, Alphabet, and to make Sundar Pichai chief executive of Google.

Page and Sergey Brin would run Alphabet.

Pichai had been senior vice president of products.

He had joined Google in 2004 after Applied Materials and McKinsey.

The first product work was Google Toolbar, then Chrome and Chrome OS, then a wider product brief.

In March 2013 he added Android after Andy Rubin left that post.

In October 2014 Page gave him product and engineering across the core internet businesses, including Search, Maps, YouTube, and Android.

The August letter made the operating title official.

Wikipedia and contemporaneous coverage date the start of the Google chief-executive job to 24 October 2015, when the Alphabet structure closed.

The pin is the Googleplex at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View.

That campus is the public headquarters.

The announcement did not come from a keynote hall.

It came as a company letter with this campus behind the letterhead.

Pichai is a living executive.

The campus is a working headquarters with a later visitor center at Gradient Canopy.

This memory marks the published handover in 2015.

It does not mark a daily office, a private floor, or the 2019 parent-company title, which belongs on a separate pin.

Photo: Google campus, Mountain View, by Austin McKinley, 25 May 2013, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Sundar Pichai, 26 February 2014, Maurizio Pesce, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.