Google CEO Sundar Pichai has made a powerful speech for those graduating class in 2020, during which he inspired by referring to the difficulties that he had to overcome growing up poor in India. The speech comes amid the most uncertain time for graduates, possibly since the end of the Second World War, as CoVid-19 sweeps away imagined jobs and near-term goals that students had set themselves. With the economy tanking across the world, Pichai's message of 'be open, be impatient, be hopeful' needs to be heard more than ever.
The speech was streamed online and was watched by both students and famous faces, including Barack Obama, Lady Gaga and K-Pop band BTS. The future CEO left Chennai, India, to pursue his studies at Stanford University in the United States, a flight to which cost his father a year's worth of wages. Upon graduating, he joined Google in 2004 and, by 2015, he had made it all the way to Chief Executive Officer.
In his speech, the 47-year-old said:
"I grew up without much access to technology. We didn't get our first telephone till I was ten. I didn't have regular access to a computer until I came to America for graduate school. And, our television, when we finally got one, only had one channel … My father spent the equivalent of a year's salary on my plane ticket to the US so I could attend Stanford. It was my first time ever on a plane...America was expensive. A phone call back home was more than $2 a minute, and a backpack cost the same as my dad's monthly salary in India."
Google has instructed all of their staff to work from home until at least June 2021 as part of the CoVid-19 lockdown measures. In an email to employees in September, Pichai said:
"We firmly believe that in-person, being together, having a sense of community is super important when you have to solve hard problems and create something new so we don't see that changing. But we do think we need to create more flexibility and more hybrid models… To give employees the ability to plan ahead, we are extending our global voluntary work from home option through June 30, 2021, for roles that don't need to be in the office. I hope this will offer the flexibility you need to balance work with taking care of yourselves and your loved ones over the next 12 months."
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