Failures sometimes lead to success stories and these stories are even more inspiring. It is the extraordinary journey of an IIT Madras dropout that later led to the revival of Google Cloud’s fortunes. Even as we bask in the glory of Indian-origin Parag Agarwal becoming the new CEO of social media giant Twitter, here is another person who is the IIT corner who makes India proud.
This is the success story of Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud, whose journey from Kottayam in Kerala to the US was a bit different and with a twist. The extraordinary journey of Thomas Kurien was shared by a user in a thread on Twitter and it is being praised everywhere.
Thomas Kurian, who has four jobs on his career list according to his LinkedIn profile, replaced Diane Greene as CEO of Google Cloud in 2018. After Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, here was another Indian who performed in the US.
Thomas Kurien was born in Kottayam district of Kerala. After completing his education, he went to the prestigious IIT Madras and studied there for the next six months, after which he dropped the course and went to Princeton University for Electrical Engineering.
After completing his electrical engineering degree, Kurian joined McKinsey and completed his MBA at Stanford. In 1996 he moved from McKinsey to Oracle, where he worked for 22 years and continued to grow. Kurian served on Oracle’s executive committee for 13 years.
He led a software development team of 35,000 people in 32 countries. Kurian helped transform Oracle’s products with the introduction of a flagship suite of cloud services. After that he became the chairman of the company. But differences with Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison over cloud strategy led to his resignation in September 2018.
Two months later, Thomas Kurian joined Google Cloud as CEO. At the time, the company was struggling to survive and was not looking good. His earlier attempts to revive the company were unsuccessful. He initiated technological developments, but did not receive much support. However, Kurien did not lose hope.
How did Thomas Kurian breathe new life into the Google Cloud?
Kurian’s initial efforts did not yield much, so he changed his strategy and focused on the company’s customer service.
Thomas Kurian first raised the salary of a Google Cloud vendor to be highly motivated.
They also hired more salespeople, technical experts and account managers because the company did not have enough people.
Kurian then simultaneously launched Google Cloud products for specific sectors like healthcare, banking and the like.
The third change, made by Thomas Kurian, addressed the corporate fear of putting all the data in a single cloud.
Thomas Kurian launched Anthos, a Google cloud platform that allows businesses to keep and manage their data on the cloud.
The changes worked wonders and Google Cloud made a wonderful comeback under the leadership of Thomas Kurian.
After implementing these changes in Google Cloud, the company saw a 45% increase in revenue and a 10% increase in market share.
Companies like PayPal, Spotify, Target and Lufthansa became customers, and it’s been an upward journey for Google Cloud since then.
(Inputs from Twitter thread)
Failures sometimes lead to success stories and these stories are even more inspiring. It is the extraordinary journey of an IIT Madras dropout that later led to the revival of Google Cloud’s fortunes. Even as we bask in the glory of Indian-origin Parag Agarwal becoming the new CEO of social media giant Twitter, here is another person who is the IIT corner who makes India proud.
This is the success story of Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud, whose journey from Kottayam in Kerala to the US was a bit different and with a twist. The extraordinary journey of Thomas Kurien was shared by a user in a thread on Twitter and it is being praised everywhere.
Thomas Kurian, who has four jobs on his career list according to his LinkedIn profile, replaced Diane Greene as CEO of Google Cloud in 2018. After Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, here was another Indian who performed in the US.
Thomas Kurien was born in Kottayam district of Kerala. After completing his education, he went to the prestigious IIT Madras and studied there for the next six months, after which he dropped the course and went to Princeton University for Electrical Engineering.
After completing his electrical engineering degree, Kurian joined McKinsey and completed his MBA at Stanford. In 1996 he moved from McKinsey to Oracle, where he worked for 22 years and continued to grow. Kurian served on Oracle’s executive committee for 13 years.
He led a software development team of 35,000 people in 32 countries. Kurian helped transform Oracle’s products with the introduction of a flagship suite of cloud services. After that he became the chairman of the company. But with Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison over cloud strategy.