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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Sundar is perhaps the most uninspiring CEO from any major American tech company when presenting. He's talking about amazing tech like quantum computing, but he sounds like he's talking about a Ford Taurus.

Is this just his external-facing persona, or is he like this internally too?

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I find most of the Apple speakers overproduced, overwrought, to the point that it comes off as in-authentic. There's only so many Johnny Ive superlatives you can layer into a talk -- beautiful, magical, amazing, incredible, etc before it becomes a meme, a joke.

I prefer the good old days of I/O, even before I/O, Google Developer Days, when geeky engineers did the presenting. When they got excited about something, it was unscripted and actually real excitement.

(I'm a Google employee), and I feel they are following in Apple's footsteps too much, especially the MadeByGoogle presentations. I/O still retains some of that authentic, geeky, cringe factor that makes it seem more connected to developers as opposed to consumers.

Do you think that's your bias speaking?

I find him to be very approachable, honest and calm presenter both internally and externally.

Yes, I'm sure it's a personal preference.

Musk and Page and Bezos all present with a bit of giddy schoolboy energy. It's clear they are all super excited to be building the future and can't wait to tell you about their cool new tech. They aren't polished presenters, but it doesn't matter.

Cook and Nadella are both very polished and calm, but still manage to convey a lot of excitement about their companies.

That leaves Zuckerberg and Pichai, who are, in my view, too flat and robotic.

Panos Panay is the best at this. I think he even beats Apple execs at exuding earnest excitement for the products he's demoing.

+Jensen Huang in the former category

I'm sure, and he's an effective speaker. But that's not the same as being inspiring, charismatic...stuff you need to be an effective leader. May be Google employees can pitch in?

I like that he isn't particularly charismatic. Neither are Larry or Sergey of course.

I like how authentic Sundar comes across (also true for the other speakers). I think the live format helps.

Far preferable to the "product manager over-emoting and constantly gesturing while trying to be genuine reading a script that was written for them" that characterizes most of the rest of the presentations, IMO.

Haha. This is my feeling. And using words they would never use! Max emotion, max buzzword blah.

Maybe he's just down-to-Earth, honest in his emotions, and doesn't like artificially hyping things up? Sounds good to me.

As a non-American, I have a different perception. For me, Sundar is one of the few CEOs that doesn't sound like a maniac robotic snake oil seller. I find it refreshing and inspiring to get a CEO that talks line a normal human being addressing normal human beings.

I think it's just a cultural thing. When it comes to level of histrionism, Americans are on one extreme of the spectrum while some Asian cultures are on the opposite one. Sundar seems to me to be in the exact sweet spot.

Tim Cook?

Tim Cook sounds like someone who is genuinely excited to tell you about a Ford Taurus.

Sundar spends most of his internal facing time talking about racial equity and less about actual business.

Source: Googler friends.

That's ridiculous. There are a handful of emails about the former topic and there are numerous hour long events where Sundar talks about other aspects the business.

Meh, the outrage crowd in Hacker News is ridiculous. Any level of effort to make a company more inclusive as criticized as the company being 'too woke'. Meanwhile, Google's market cap has exploded in recent years.

Lots of people too scared of 'cancel culture' (read: being caught and having to pay the consequences) around here.

Not a Googler but I think that's great, personally. Google has already found a stable business model and racial equity is a problem.

This is why I've turned down a couple recruiters for Google. It's just not worth it anymore for me.

Would you consider working at Apple? They are also quite vocal about issues like racial justice. They still seem to be praised as an employer, though.

I thought Apple was looked down as a cult secret culture kind of place. Not sure I've heard any praise by anyone aside from large pay and fun to work on cool products.

Both of those things apply to pretty much every big company. As far as reputation as an employer goes, Apple is certainly ahead of Facebook and Amazon.

In what regard is Apple better? Pay / Options / Wfh / office parties, freebies, offices, 20% personal projects?

When inflation sets food prices skyrocketing, cafes and microkitchens will look better than ever as part of the benefits.

Really? Externally Google gives the appearance that it doesn't care about racial equity.

https://about.google/intl/ALL_uk/commitments/racialequity/

Meanwhile, Google's market cap has tripled during his tenure as CEO.

Maybe being flashy and showy isn't all that important after all.

Since he became CEO, the company has gone up 234%. The S&P500 has gone up 101%.

But Microsoft went up 364%, Apple went up 320%, And Amazon went up 420%.

So if you're just looking at market performance, while he outpaced the S&P500, he underperformed his biggest competitors.

Meanwhile, Satya Nadella isn't flashy and Jeff Bezos hasn't been involved in any kind of keynote speech on anything related to Amazon in years.

So my point stands: flashiness doesn't correlate with performance.

If the top priority is to satisfy Worthington's law, sure. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Worthington%27s_law

You make the mistake of believing that market cap is the only or most important way to measure the success of a business. It isn't. Not even remotely.

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