Sundar Pichai grew up in a two-room apartment in Chennai without a television or a car for much of his childhood, sharing a bed with his younger brother and waiting years for his family to afford a rotary telephone, which he later described as feeling like a small technological miracle when it finally arrived.
He excelled academically, earning admission to the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur before moving to the United States for graduate studies at Stanford, a path that required his father, an electrical engineer, to contribute nearly a year's salary toward the plane ticket and initial expenses alone.
He joined Google in 2004 in a product management role working on the Google Toolbar, a comparatively unglamorous early assignment, and gradually took on larger responsibilities over the following decade, including leading the development of the Chrome browser and eventually the Android operating system, both of which grew into some of the company's most consequential products.
In 2015, he was named CEO of Google, and later of its parent company Alphabet in 2019, becoming one of the highest-profile Indian-origin executives in global technology, a trajectory that began with a family stretching every resource they had toward a single opportunity abroad.