The growing cohort of Indian-origin global CEOs, on February 28, welcomed a new member who had nurtured American Dreams in a small temple town of South India. He was a growth driver for Google’s advertising business from $1.5 billion to over $100 billion during his 15-year tenure but could not enter the search giant’s C-suite despite his huge potential. He resigned from Google within 3 years of Sundar Pichai’s new leadership role as CEO.
Finally, Sridhar Ramaswamy, the erstwhile king of Google advertising, hit the jackpot as the new CEO of a multibillion dollar data cloud company, Snowflake, headquartered in Montana. Within 12 months of joining Snowflake after the acquisition of his ad-free search engine named Neeva, he is elevated to the CEO role and the company’s board of directors from the previous position of Senior Vice President of artificial intelligence.
The 57-year-old tech behemoth has been helming the AI strategy at Snowflake, from planning to execution to scaling up, since 2023. “As the leading cloud data platform, Snowflake is at the epicentre of the AI revolution. There is no better person than Sridhar to lead the company into this next phase of growth and deliver on the opportunity ahead in AI and machine learning. He is a visionary technologist with a proven track record of running and scaling successful businesses. I have the utmost confidence in Sridhar,” said Frank Slootman, the Chairman of the Board at Snowflake.
As CEO of Snowflake, Sridhar Ramaswamy will be leading a global workforce of around 6000 employees to reach new highs in artificial intelligence; a herculean task given Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s struggle to make Google Gemini deliver unerring performance. Apparently, Mr Ramaswamy is consummate in both online search technology and artificial intelligence. He is a fitness freak and avid reader too.
Born in Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, Mr. Ramaswamy took the world aback with his launch of the world’s first private ads-free search engine, Neeva, nearby Google’s headquarters in California. Neeva was born out of his disillusion with Google’ s reckless tracking of user data for more revenues from online advertising. Possibly, his picture of a utopian search world where consumer privacy is not a commodity fell apart, leading to his resignation from Google where he climbed up the ranks from a software engineer to the Senior Vice President of ads and commerce.
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Sridhar Ramaswamy co-founded Neeva with Vivek Raghunathan, an ex-VP of Engineering at Google, to generate a revenue by selling economical subscriptions for ad-free experience, not by tracking users for targeted advertising. Google was (and is) too formidable to be shaken though Neeva was initially hailed as competition to Google and was able to raise funds. Nearly a dozen of Googlers joined Neeva in various roles and departments over time. However, Snowflake acquired Neeva in 2023 and brought the cofounders – Sridhar and Vivek – on board.
It was Sridhar Ramaswamy, an IIT Madras graduate, whose fire in the belly, passion for new technologies, and prior experience of machine learning development were among the building blocks of Google’s advertising empire. In 2003, he joined Google with a treasure of experience as a researcher and a database analyst from Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Epiphany, Inc. He became a part of the American workforce after having earned a master’s degree and PhD in computer science from Brown University, an Ivy League research university in Rhode Island.
“A lot has been told and written about Indian-origin CEOs leading enterprises over US$1 trillion. A documentary should now be made on what makes Indians astute business leaders and global CEOs, from Laxman Narasimhan at Starbucks to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan to Edelweiss AMC’s MD & CEO Radhika Gupta, giving an insight into their certain qualities, such as the art of dealing with cultural intricacies, flexible adaptability, expertise in making multicultural collaborations, the trait of treating a team like family, etc.,” said Sourav Agarwal, the Editor of Travel Beats.
Indian origin nationals have successfully carried out positions in public sector also. I wish such stories are also brought to the attention of readers. I like to contribute such article for the benefit of readers and show how Indians have contributed to tax payers also. It is very unfortunate that such stories are given same weight as the profit making private sector.