Sundar Pichai Takes Over as Alphabet CEO

You may have noticed that we do not devote much time to profiling the CEOs of the companies that we hold in Vestact portfolios. It's not that company management are unimportant. A good strategy is developed and implemented by a talented team, and sound decision making is crucial for modern multi-national corporations. Conversely, a rotten manager can do a lot of damage.

The reason that we de-emphasise company leaders is that they come and go, and we try to own businesses for much longer than the average tenure of its bosses. Also, the business model is often more important than the person at the top. As Warren Buffett once wrote, "I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them because sooner or later, one will."

I was thinking about all this because I saw overnight that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will step down as CEO and president of Alphabet (Google's parent company). Google chief Sundar Pichai will also take over as CEO of Alphabet.

Page and Brin created Google in 1998 while students at Stanford University and are still very significant shareholders. Thanks to their holdings of super voting Google Class B shares, they jointly control just over 50% of the voting power of the whole group. Page and Brin are both only 46 years old, so I guess that they will be around for a while. Of course, Sundar Pichai is a genius, and is doing a great job of running a business with tremendous prospects, so we should be fine.

More on the transition here, on tech news site Slate: Google's Co-Founders, Who Have Been Disappearing From the Company for Years, Are Stepping Down.