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 PhDs. 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.
