Ex-Google engineer says Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai share the same trait—it’s the lesson he swears by as a $7.2 billion AI CEO

When Arvind Jain, the now co-founder of Rubrik and Glean, landed a job at Google, he felt like an “imposter”. The engineer had moved to America from a small town in India and suddenly found himself surrounded by MIT and Stanford Ph Ds. So he made a point of quietly studying those around him. And one of those people was a product manager who had just joined the company. His name was Sundar Pichai. “We were together at Google for a long time. I knew him from when he joined as an individual contributor,” Jain exclusively told Fortune. “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?” Of course, Pichai ended up being one of those individuals who shone. He became CEO of Google in August 2015, just over a decade after joining the company. “What I learned by observing him was that the same attributes kept coming up—intensity, hard work. But also the ability to think big and have confidence,” Jain revealed. “You have to think crazy.” Sundar Pichai’s Google Chrome success proves that ‘crazy’ beats hard work alone, the CEO says The moment that crystallized it was watching Pichai champion Google Chrome, at a time when the idea looked foolish on paper. Browsers were Microsoft’s territory, Netscape had already failed, and few inside Google thought it was worth the effort. Jain included. “I felt like that’s such a bad idea,” he admitted. “I was not thinking big enough.” Even Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer once publicly dismissed Chrome as a “rounding error.” But of course, Chrome went on to become the world’s most widely used browser—far bigger than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.