Why Google Cloud's new CEO Thomas Kurian quit Oracle after 22 years

All you need to know about Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s new CEO and Silicon Valley success story.

Home-grown
Born in the late ’60s, Kurian grew up in a small town called Pampady in Kerala’s Kottayam district. He has an identical twin, George — also a Silicon Valley executive. Pampady is currently well-known for its engineering college and George has said in interviews that the twins have remained grounded due to their strict Christian upbringing, courtesy their mother.


New world
After school, Kurian was accepted into IIT-Madras, but left after six months to study engineering at Princeton University. His brother George was also accepted into the university and the two travelled to America on scholarships in 1986. After graduating from Princeton, Kurian did an MBA from Stanford Business School. While Kurian is known for his work at Oracle, he was initially hired by McKinsey. At the time, George was working for Oracle. The year of the big switch came in 1996, when George got hired by McKinsey, and Thomas, by Oracle. In a 2016 interview, Kurian shared why he became a programmer, “I came to college in the United States and I didn’t realise that things were so expensive, so I was looking for the highest paid per hour job that I could get as a student. And that’s when I decided, hey, in programming you get paid a lot of money...”


Close confidant
Kurian served at Oracle for over two decades. His first executive position was when he was named vice-president of Oracle’s e-business division. After holding a few other executive positions, Kurian moved up to become president of product development. CNN named him among the top 20 highest paid people and the fifth highest-paid tech executive in 2010. Kurian was a close confidant of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and received a pay package of almost $36 million from the company in 2017. According to reports, during meetings, Ellison would turn to Kurian for a second opinion and affirmation on decisions. “He always looks back at Thomas and says, ‘Thomas, what do you think? Thomas, let’s do that.’ It was something to watch them,” a former executive told Reuters.

Fall out boy
Oracle announced on September 5 that Kurian was taking a leave of absence from the company he had worked for 22 years. Kurian and Ellison reportedly had a falling out over the direction of its cloud business. Kurian wanted Oracle to make more of its software available to run on public clouds from rivals Amazon and Microsoft. Ellison, however, was opposed to this. Growing differences between the two reportedly led to Kurian breaking away.

Greener pastures
Later in September, Oracle announced that Kurian had resigned, without elaborating further. The big news came about two months later. On November 16, Google confirmed that Kurian would be taking over from Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene on November 26. Greene said that she, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the company’s senior vice-president for technical infrastructure Urs Hölzle interviewed Kurian for the post. Only time will tell whether Kurian takes Google Cloud to greater levels.