Awaneesh Verma leads Google Meet, Google Voice, and other real-time communication products at Alphabet, overseeing a massive network reaching about 3 billion users and 11 million companies worldwide.
However, his drive to eliminate communication friction and ensure people are “truly understanding each other” is rooted in a personal journey that stretches back before his time at Uber and Duolingo—to when he learned how barriers can keep people from communicating.
Born in the UK to parents who had immigrated from India, Verma spent his young childhood in the midlands city of Sheffield. He recalled in a recent interview with Fortune that, for the longest time, he was “the only Indian kid in my class.”
While his hometown is “a great place,” he couldn’t help but wonder “what the rest of the world felt and looked like.” He recalled how he was fascinated with a physical atlas in the days before Google Maps. “I’m like just looking at maps and drawing places based on that.”
Years later, when Verma was an engineering major at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he heard Google’s head of engineering, Alan Eustace, give a talk about ongoing projects, including Google Translate. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is the future of connecting people.” Within a few years, Verma was working on Google Translate, part of a journey that took him to Duolingo as its first ever head of product, before a stop at Uber, also as head of project, and a return to Google.
