'You have to...' - Google chief Sundar Pichai’s secret to success revealed

Arvind Jain, now co-founder of Rubrik and Glean, has said he felt like an ‘imposter’ when he joined Google after moving to America from a small town in India. In an interview with Fortune, Jain said he found himself among highly accomplished colleagues from top schools and began quietly observing what made some people succeed. One of them was Sundar Pichai.

Jain said watching Pichai taught him that hard work alone was not enough. Alongside intensity and persistence, success also required confidence and the ability to think big, he said. Those lessons stayed with him as he went on to build Rubrik and Glean. Jain added that he still learns from his youngest Gen Z hires because they bring fresh points of view.

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‘We were together at Google for a long time. I knew him from when he joined as an individual contributor,’ Jain told Fortune. He said Google had many brilliant people from the best schools, but not all of them went on to shine. ‘I thought that I got lucky... And that was why I was trying to learn and observe what makes one succeed?’ he said. Of Pichai, Jain said intensity, hard work, big thinking and confidence kept appearing. ‘You have to think crazy,’ he said.

Jain said the lesson became clearest when he saw Pichai return to Google Chrome at a time when the idea did not look promising. Browsers were seen as Microsoft’s territory, Netscape had already failed, and few people inside Google believed the effort was worth it, he said, adding that he was among them. ‘I felt like that’s such a bad idea,’ Jain said.

‘I was not thinking big enough.’ Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer also publicly dismissed Chrome as a ‘rounding error’. Chrome later became the world’s most widely used browser, overtook its rivals by 2012, and helped strengthen Pichai’s standing inside Google before his rise to chief executive in August 2015.

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Reflecting on that episode, Jain said it taught him that ‘we’re going to do this thing which everybody thinks is stupid, maybe unrealistic’ and added, ‘That’s when magic happens.’ He said the experience reinforced his view that thinking ‘crazy’ was as important as persistence, and that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin shared that trait. ‘They had no sort of constraints in their minds on what’s possible,’ he said, adding that he learned both hard work and ‘the disregard for normalcy and regular constraint thinking’.

After leaving Google, Jain co-founded Rubrik, the cloud data management company that listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024 at around $5.6 billion. He later launched Glean, an AI start-up that helps employees search and understand information across their company, now valued at $7.2 billion. Jain said he continues to learn from younger colleagues. ‘Actually, I feel like I learn the most from the youngest people,’ he told Fortune, adding that they have ‘new points of view’.