A former Google employee has revealed one common quality that he observed in co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the current CEO Sundar Pichai. When Arvind Jain arrived at Google, he felt like he did not belong because he was an engineer from a small town in India sitting who happened to be sitting alongside MIT and Stanford PhDs. He has revealed that rather than let that intimidate him into silence, he did something deliberate: he started watching the people around him, trying to understand what separated those who thrived from those who did not.“At Google, we had people who were brilliant, they came from the best schools, they were highly accomplished, and there were some who grew and shone, and then there were others who didn’t,” he said. “I thought that I got lucky, that somehow I got placed in this group of amazing people… And that was why I was trying to learn and observe what makes one succeed?” According to a report in Fortune, one of the people he observed was a product manager who had just joined the company. His name was Sundar Pichai who, about a decade later, became the top executive of the world’s biggest Search company. Jain revealed that Google’s most legendary leaders share one personality trait: a total disregard for normal thinking.“We were together at Google for a long time. I knew him from when he joined as an individual contributor,” Jain told Fortune.“What I learned by observing Pichai was that the same attributes kept coming up—intensity, hard work. But also the ability to think big and have confidence. You have to think crazy,” Jain exclusively told Fortune.
The gamble that proved ‘crazy’ wins
Jain explained that the moment that completely changed his perspective on leadership was watching Pichai champion the creation of the Google Chrome web browser. At the time, the project seemed like a massive, foolish waste of money.During the mid-2000s, Microsoft dominated the browser market with Internet Explorer, Netscape had crashed and almost no one inside Google believed building a new browser was worth the risk. Even Jain admitted he thought it was a terrible plan.External tech giants agreed; Microsoft’s then-CEO Steve Ballmer publicly laughed off Chrome as a mere “rounding error”.“I felt like that’s such a bad idea. I was not thinking big enough. You have to say: we’re going to do this thing which everybody thinks is stupid, maybe unrealistic. That’s when magic happens,” Jain recalled.Pichai’s gamble paid off massively. By 2012, Chrome dethroned Internet Explorer to become the world’s number-one web browser. The success cemented Pichai’s internal reputation and paved his path to becoming Google’s CEO in 2015.
The secret formula of winning
According to Jain, working hard is only half the battle in Silicon Valley. The real differentiator for Google’s top leaders is their refusal to accept traditional limits. Jain points out that this exact lack of mental boundaries is what ties Pichai directly to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.“They had no sort of constraints in their minds on what’s possible. So I think that those were the two main things I learned: hard work, but then the disregard for normalcy and regular constraint thinking,” Jain said.