When Google CEO Sundar Pichai debunked myths about his schooling

Was Google CEO Sundar Pichai homeschooled? Did he decide to join IIT at the age of 8?

The internet is full of such doubts and fancy stories about successful people. But recently, Pichai himself has debunked many of these stories.

In a recent podcast interview, Pichai was asked whether he decided to join IIT at the young age of eight.


"My parents were tired of me. They sent me to school, I think, when I was about 2 and a half to kindergarten. I was pretty young when I came to Stanford. But that is not true," Pichai replied.

Pichai also said he wasn't homeschooled.

Asked whether he read his profile on Wikipedia - which had over 350 edits in the week he became the CEO of Google - Pichai replied: "Advice I would have for all of you is don’t read about yourself online."

The CEO of Google also advised MBA students to reward efforts and not outcomes

"You have to encourage innovation. One of the counter-intuitive things is that companies become more conservative as they grow. You have a lot more cash. You have a lot more resources. But companies tend to become more conservative in their decision making. And so, encourage the company to take risks and innovate and be okay with failure and reward effort, not outcomes," Pichai said.

"People tend to reward outcomes, which means over time, the organization becomes more conservative. They take safer bets and so on. So a lot of scaling is about making sure you preserve the good things you had in the early days. And that gets harder as the company becomes bigger. You have to work harder at it. But I think a big part of what we try hard to do is to keep that culture of innovating with technology, building products, shipping things. And so that’s one of the many things," he further added.