And when Google forced out an AI ethics researcher of color-and then a second researcher-for what looked like flimsy reasons, the company suffered blows to its reputation, and some employees left.
Pichai took heat in Congress for Google’s alleged favoritism toward its own products in search. During that time, his division became a center of controversy. In June, he assumed his huge current role, running an organization of more than 20,000 Googlers doing the company’s most critical work. But he thrived at the top, first as the person in charge of the G-Suite of applications and later as the top executive for ads and commerce. “We thought he’d be eaten alive,” says one. When he finally did land at Google, in 2012, he moved from research to management, a pivot that some of his admirers assumed might be ill-fated. Instead of joining them, Raghavan wound up heading the research division at Yahoo. Indeed, while teaching at Stanford in the 1990s, he had spirited discussions with the pair of grad students about the wisdom of starting a company based on web search. He was publishing on information retrieval well before Larry Page and Sergey Brin thought of tackling the problem. (Raghavan entered the US pipeline with a PhD from UC Berkeley.) But while Pichai focused on a management career-he has an MBA and once worked at McKinsey-Raghavan is known as a world-class computer scientist who has authored definitive texts in the field. Both were born in southeastern India and attended the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, which has become a sort of finishing school for future US tech executives. In some ways, Raghavan would seem in the mold of his boss, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
And he’s paid like a CEO-last year the company paid him $55 million in salary and stock. He runs search, ads, commerce, maps, payments, and Google Assistant, businesses that bring in the lion’s share of the company’s revenue. Though Prabhakar Raghavan recoils at hearing himself described as “the CEO of Google,” the 60-year-old engineer turned executive is as close to being that person as one could be.
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