Failures sometimes lead to success stories and these stories are even more inspiring. Such is the extraordinary journey of an IIT Madras dropout who later steered the revival of Google Cloud’s fortunes. Even as we bask in the glory of India-born Parag Agarwal becoming the new CEO of social media giant Twitter, here is another man with an IIT angle who is making India proud.
This is the success story of Google Cloud’s CEO Thomas Kurian whose journey from Kerala’s Kottayam to the US was a bit different and with a twist. Thomas Kurian’s extraordinary journey was shared on Twitter in a thread by a user and this is receiving accolades from all over.
Thomas Kurian who has four jobs listed to his career as per his LinkedIn profile succeeded Diane Greene to become the CEO of Google Cloud in 2018. After Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, here was another Indian to achieve such a feat in the US.
Thomas Kurian was born in Kerala’s Kottayam district. After completing his schooling he got into the prestigious IIT Madras and studied there for the next six months after which he dropped out of the course and moved to Princeton University for electrical engineering.
After completing his electrical engineering degree, Kurian joined McKinsey and completed his MBA from Stanford. In 1996, he moved from McKinsey to Oracle where he worked for 22 years rising through the ranks. Kurian was Oracle’s Executive Committee member for 13 years.
He led a team of 35,000 people software development spread across 32 countries. Kurian helped in the transformation of Oracle’s products with the introduction of a leading suite of Cloud Services. He then went on to become the company’s President. But the difference 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 its CEO. Back then the company was struggling for survival and things weren’t looking pretty good. To revive the company his initial attempts proved to be a failure. He introduced technological advancements but that did not receive much support. However, Kurian did not lose hope.
How did Thomas Kurian revive Google Cloud?
Kurian’s initial efforts did not yield much results so he changed his strategy and shifted focus to the customer service of the company.
Thomas Kurian first increased the salaries of Google Cloud salespersons exorbitantly to keep them motivated.
He also hired more salespeople, technical specialists and account managers as the company didn’t have enough people.
Kurian then simultaneously launched Google Cloud products for specific industries like healthcare, banking and such others.
The third change brought by Thomas Kurian addressed companies’ apprehension to put all data in one single cloud.
Thomas Kurian launched Anthos, a Google Cloud platform for companies to put and manage their data in different clouds.
The changes did wonders and Google Cloud made a smashing comeback under Thomas Kurian’s leadership.
After these changes were introduced to Google Cloud, the company’s revenue moved up by 45% and market share rose by 10%.
Companies including Paypal, Spotify, Target, Lufthansa became customers and it has since been an upward journey for Google Cloud.
(Inputs from the Twitter thread)
Failures sometimes lead to success stories and these stories are even more inspiring. Such is the extraordinary journey of an IIT Madras dropout who later steered the revival of Google Cloud’s fortunes. Even as we bask in the glory of India-born Parag Agarwal becoming the new CEO of social media giant Twitter, here is another man with an IIT angle who is making India proud.
This is the success story of Google Cloud’s CEO Thomas Kurian whose journey from Kerala’s Kottayam to the US was a bit different and with a twist. Thomas Kurian’s extraordinary journey was shared on Twitter in a thread by a user and this is receiving accolades from all over.
Thomas Kurian who has four jobs listed to his career as per his LinkedIn profile succeeded Diane Greene to become the CEO of Google Cloud in 2018. After Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, here was another Indian to achieve such a feat in the US.
Thomas Kurian was born in Kerala’s Kottayam district. After completing his schooling he got into the prestigious IIT Madras and studied there for the next six months after which he dropped out of the course and moved to Princeton University for electrical engineering.
After completing his electrical engineering degree, Kurian joined McKinsey and completed his MBA from Stanford. In 1996, he moved from McKinsey to Oracle where he worked for 22 years rising through the ranks. Kurian was Oracle’s Executive Committee member for 13 years.
He led a team of 35,000 people software development spread across 32 countries. Kurian helped in the transformation of Oracle’s products with the introduction of a leading suite of Cloud Services. He then went on to become the company’s President. But the difference 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 its CEO. Back then the company was struggling for survival and things weren’t looking pretty good. To revive the company his initial attempts proved to be a failure. He introduced technological advancements but that did not receive much support. However, Kurian did not lose hope.
How did Thomas Kurian revive Google Cloud?
Kurian’s initial efforts did not yield much results so he changed his strategy and shifted focus to the customer service of the company.
Thomas Kurian first increased the salaries of Google Cloud salespersons exorbitantly to keep them motivated.
He also hired more salespeople, technical specialists and account managers as the company didn’t have enough people.
Kurian then simultaneously launched Google Cloud products for specific industries like healthcare, banking and such others.
The third change brought by Thomas Kurian addressed companies’ apprehension to put all data in one single cloud.
Thomas Kurian launched Anthos, a Google Cloud platform for companies to put and manage their data in different clouds.
The changes did wonders and Google Cloud made a smashing comeback under Thomas Kurian’s leadership.
After these changes were introduced to Google Cloud, the company’s revenue moved up by 45% and market share rose by 10%.
Companies including Paypal, Spotify, Target, Lufthansa became customers and it has since been an upward journey for Google Cloud.
