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Sundar is perhaps the most uninspiring CEO from any major American tech company when presenting. He's talking about amazing tech like quantum computing, but he
by nostromo 5y ago
Sundar is perhaps the most uninspiring CEO from any major American tech company when presenting. He's talking about amazing tech like quantum computing, but he sounds like he's talking about a Ford Taurus.
Is this just his external-facing persona, or is he like this internally too?
- actuator 5y agoTim Cook?
- mortenjorck 5y agoTim Cook sounds like someone who is genuinely excited to tell you about a Ford Taurus.
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoWho the hell cares.
- throwaway3699 5y agoSundar spends most of his internal facing time talking about racial equity and less about actual business. Source: Googler friends.
- kenjackson 5y agoReally? Externally Google gives the appearance that it doesn't care about racial equity.
- throwaway3699 5y agohttps://about.google/intl/ALL_uk/commitments/racialequity/ https://about.google/intl/ALL_uk/commitments/racialequity/
- UncleMeat 5y agoThat's ridiculous. There are a handful of emails about the former topic and there are numerous hour long events where Sundar talks about other aspects the business.
- _euac 5y agoMeh, the outrage crowd in Hacker News is ridiculous. Any level of effort to make a company more inclusive as criticized as the company being 'too woke'. Meanwhile, Google's market cap has exploded in recent years. Lots of people too scared of 'cancel culture' (read: being caught and having to pay the consequences) around here.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rabuse 5y agoThis is why I've turned down a couple recruiters for Google. It's just not worth it anymore for me.
- _euac 5y agoMeanwhile, Google's market cap has tripled during his tenure as CEO. Maybe being flashy and showy isn't all that important after all.
- Lammy 5y agoIf the top priority is to satisfy Worthington's law, sure. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Worthington%27s_law https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Worthington%27s_law
- reaperducer 5y agoYou make the mistake of believing that market cap is the only or most important way to measure the success of a business. It isn't. Not even remotely.
- jedberg 5y agoSince he became CEO, the company has gone up 234%. The S&P500 has gone up 101%. But Microsoft went up 364%, Apple went up 320%, And Amazon went up 420%. So if you're just looking at market performance, while he outpaced the S&P500, he underperformed his biggest competitors.
- _euac 5y agoMeanwhile, Satya Nadella isn't flashy and Jeff Bezos hasn't been involved in any kind of keynote speech on anything related to Amazon in years. So my point stands: flashiness doesn't correlate with performance.
- tosh 5y agoI like how authentic Sundar comes across (also true for the other speakers). I think the live format helps.
- pschuegr 5y agoFar preferable to the "product manager over-emoting and constantly gesturing while trying to be genuine reading a script that was written for them" that characterizes most of the rest of the presentations, IMO.
- slownews45 5y agoHaha. This is my feeling. And using words they would never use! Max emotion, max buzzword blah.
- dheera 5y agoMaybe he's just down-to-Earth, honest in his emotions, and doesn't like artificially hyping things up? Sounds good to me.
- asadlionpk 5y agoDo you think that's your bias speaking? I find him to be very approachable, honest and calm presenter both internally and externally.
- nostromo 5y agoYes, I'm sure it's a personal preference. Musk and Page and Bezos all present with a bit of giddy schoolboy energy. It's clear they are all super excited to be building the future and can't wait to tell you about their cool new tech. They aren't polished presenters, but it doesn't matter. Cook and Nadella are both very polished and calm, but still manage to convey a lot of excitement about their companies. That leaves Zuckerberg and Pichai, who are, in my view, too flat and robotic.
- herdcall 5y agoI'm sure, and he's an effective speaker. But that's not the same as being inspiring, charismatic...stuff you need to be an effective leader. May be Google employees can pitch in?
- mrwh 5y agoI like that he isn't particularly charismatic. Neither are Larry or Sergey of course.
- cromwellian 5y agoI find most of the Apple speakers overproduced, overwrought, to the point that it comes off as in-authentic. There's only so many Johnny Ive superlatives you can layer into a talk -- beautiful, magical, amazing, incredible, etc before it becomes a meme, a joke. I prefer the good old days of I/O, even before I/O, Google Developer Days, when geeky engineers did the presenting. When they got excited about something, it was unscripted and actually real excitement. (I'm a Google employee), and I feel they are following in Apple's footsteps too much, especially the MadeByGoogle presentations. I/O still retains some of that authentic, geeky, cringe factor that makes it seem more connected to developers as opposed to consumers.
- madia_leva 5y agoAs a non-American, I have a different perception. For me, Sundar is one of the few CEOs that doesn't sound like a maniac robotic snake oil seller. I find it refreshing and inspiring to get a CEO that talks line a normal human being addressing normal human beings. I think it's just a cultural thing. When it comes to level of histrionism, Americans are on one extreme of the spectrum while some Asian cultures are on the opposite one. Sundar seems to me to be in the exact sweet spot.