think crazy – After joining Google from a small town in India, ex-engineer Arvind Jain says he quietly studied the people around him—especially Sundar Pichai. Jain says the trait that kept showing up was intensity and hard work, paired with the ability to think big and disr
When Arvind Jain first landed at Google, he didn’t feel like a winner in a room full of winners. He felt like an imposter.
Jain had moved to America from a small town in India. and suddenly the office seemed to run on proof—MIT and Stanford PhDs. brilliant product thinkers. and people with résumés that looked impossible to match. So he did what he could control: he studied. Quietly. Intentionally. Watching what separated the people who stayed on top from everyone else.
One of those people was a new product manager, Sundar Pichai. Jain says they worked together at Google for a long time and that he knew Pichai from when Pichai joined as an individual contributor.
Jain told Fortune that he believed he’d “got lucky” by being placed around exceptional people. and that he tried to learn and observe what made them succeed. He described a split he kept noticing at Google: some people were brilliant and came from the best schools. highly accomplished—and then others grew and shone. In his mind, the “shining” didn’t come from credentials alone. It came from a repeatable way of thinking and working.
Pichai, of course, went on to shine in the way that changes careers and headlines. Jain pointed to how Pichai became CEO of Google in August 2015, just over a decade after joining the company.
Jain says the pattern he saw in Pichai was consistent. The same attributes kept coming up: “intensity” and hard work. But Jain also says Pichai stood out for something less measurable—confidence and the ability to think big. “You have to think crazy,” Jain said.
The moment that crystallized it, Jain said, was watching Pichai champion Google Chrome at a time when the idea looked foolish.
In Jain’s telling, browsers were Microsoft’s territory, Netscape had already failed, and few inside Google thought it was worth the effort—even Jain. He admitted, “I felt like that’s such a bad idea.”
He remembers being too cautious at the time. “I was not thinking big enough,” he said.
The skepticism wasn’t just internal. Jain pointed to how Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer publicly dismissed Chrome as a “rounding error.”
But Chrome didn’t stay a bad idea. It became the world’s most widely used browser, far bigger than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Jain said that by 2012. Chrome had already surpassed its rivals to become the world’s most-used browser. and that it helped cement Pichai’s reputation inside Google—paving the way for his rise to CEO.
Jain said that when Pichai pushed forward, it forced the larger lesson into focus: you have to commit to something everyone thinks is stupid or unrealistic, because “That’s when magic happens.”
Jain connected that lesson back to the founders too. He said he believed Larry Page and Sergey Brin shared the same trait as Pichai—that there were “no sort of constraints in their minds on what’s possible.”
In his view, it came down to two things learned from watching: hard work, and “the disregard for normalcy and regular constraint thinking.”
Jain left Google after internalizing those observations. And he didn’t just use the lesson once.
He co-founded Rubrik, the cloud data management company that IPO’d on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024 at around $5.6 billion. After that, he launched Glean, an AI startup that helps employees search and understand information across their entire company.
Glean is now valued at $7.2 billion.
Even after building two billion-dollar companies, Jain says he’s still learning—this time from people who weren’t part of his original anxiety.
He told Fortune he takes the most notes from his youngest Gen Z hires. “Actually, I feel like I learn the most from the youngest people,” Jain said. “They’re the ones who have not seen the things that I’ve seen. They have new points of view.”
It’s the same structure as before—watch, absorb, and test what works—only the cast has changed. The core lesson, Jain says, remains: hard work matters, but thinking past the “normal” limits might be the difference between grinding for approval and building something that wins.
Arvind Jain Rubrik Glean Google Sundar Pichai Larry Page Sergey Brin Chrome AI startup valuation CEO