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Searching For Sundar Pichai

buzzfeed.com

132 pointstsycho20 comments

Interesting the CEO of Google can walk through CES undetected. What makes a business leader go from anonymous to celebrity? The press probably over-focuses on the celebrity types who probably only account for a fraction of important decisions in the tech world.

Many founders of relatively insignificant companies are more famous than many CEOs of significant companies. Founder is far more accreditive social capital wise than CEO.

Interesting that they're actively looking to reduce bandwidth usage. Hopefully it's the start of a trend.

> Bavor, for example, keeps a running document of things he’s learned from Pichai. (It’s three pages long. Sample entry: “Always choose quality. If you have to delay things to ship a quality product, delay.”)

I'm curious what other items are on the list.

Funny how this is pretty much the exact opposite of Zuck's "move fast and break things" mantra.

I think more so than the choice itself, what's important is that you design a system with integrity. If you want to go in the direction of quality, always choose quality and make decisions in favor of creating an organization geared towards quality. Whenever you go against the system you've created, the outcome will be poor because your system isn't built to handle it.

Buzzfeed has really improved its content lately. If not for the tacky social media badges, I wouldn't have guessed it was BF.

I was stunned this is BF. Great long form profile. I was wondering if maybe the content is shared / re-run under some other brand as well or if BF can afford to do this in depth stuff itself.

Agreed, BuzzFeed has produced some great articles of late.

It's written by Mat Honan, who earlier used to write for Wired.

Over the next five years, they'll use this sense of surprising quality to slide native or embedded or whatever they call it advertising right past your radar.

Just like they do at all the "respectable" news agencies?

Okay? Then what? Do I read nothing? Pay $300+/year per site that I want to read?

I'm not sure what the "call to action" of your comment is - if the adver-article is interesting, more power to them.

> Pay $300+/year per site that I want to read?

If it's a site you really really like and you want to support them in a tangible way, then yes that's not necessarily a bad use for your money.

The Boston Post started as a joke of a newspaper that did publicity stunts to get viewers. They took the money they made from it, hired a bunch of good investigative journalists, and eventually exposed Charles Ponzi. They went on to be a respected newspaper.

Seems like Buzzfeed is doing the same thing.

I can't remember where I heard this, but I think the whole listicle thing generating a profit so that they could produce actually good journalism was always the plan.

I mean, I sometimes hear from their foreign correspondents on NPR or podcasts I'm interested in. They do have some great journalists on staff.

Ben Thompson from Stratechery was pushing this thesis for quite a while now.

As long as the "good" journalism doesn't offend any of their listicle sponsors, of course

Actually, they have a Serious news section which it's pretty good (all things considered). It's been a while since they've added it.

IMHO, it would be fair to criticize this piece for poor editing. The writing feels a bit rough in places. There are sentences and paragraphs which can be considerably abbreviated to be more readable. Further, the article's flow is a bit off. Overall great narrative, though.

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