During his 15-year tenure, he drove Google’s advertising business from $1.5 billion to over $100 billion, yet despite his enormous potential, he was unable to get into the C-suite of the search engine. Within three years of Sundar Pichai taking over as CEO, he left Google.
At last, the multibillionaire CEO of Snowflake, a data cloud startup based in Montana, turned out to be Sridhar Ramaswamy, the former king of Google advertising. After Neeva, his ad-free search engine, was acquired by Snowflake, he joined the firm within a year and was immediately promoted from Senior Vice President of Artificial Intelligence to CEO and member of the board of directors.
Since 2023, the 57-year-old IT giant has been in charge of Snowflake’s AI strategy, from planning to execution to scaling up. At the core of the AI revolution is Snowflake, the top cloud data platform. Sridhar is the ideal candidate to guide the business into its next stage of expansion and take advantage of the AI and machine learning opportunities that lie ahead. He is a forward-thinking technologist with experience managing and growing profitable companies. We are completely confident in Sridhar.
Mr. Ramaswamy, who was born in Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, stunned everyone by launching Neeva, the first private search engine without advertisements, close to Google’s California headquarters. Neeva was founded as a result of his dissatisfaction with Google’s careless surveillance of user data in order to increase online advertising revenue. It’s possible that his idealised vision of a search engine utopia where user privacy is valued highly collapsed, which caused him to resign from Google, where he rose from software developer to Senior Vice President of Advertisements and Commerce.
Together with former Google vice president of engineering Vivek Raghunathan, Sridhar Ramaswamy co-founded Neeva with the goal of making money through the sale of affordable memberships for an ad-free experience rather than by tracking people for personalised advertising. Even though Neeva was first heralded as a competitor to Google and was able to gather cash, Google was (and still is) too powerful to be overcome. Over time, Neeva was joined by around a dozen Google employees in a variety of departments and responsibilities. But in 2023, Snowflake bought Neeva and added Sridhar and Vivek, the cofounders, to the company.
The man behind Google’s advertising empire was Sridhar Ramaswamy, an IIT Madras graduate whose drive, enthusiasm, and skill with machine learning research were among its foundational elements. He brought a wealth of experience from Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Epiphany, Inc. as a researcher and database analyst when he joined Google in 2003. After receiving his master’s and doctorate in computer science from Rhode Island’s Brown University, an Ivy League academic institution, he entered the workforce in the United States.