Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Google Holds on to Product VP Sundar Pichai After Daring Twitter Talent Raid Attempt

Google VP Sundar Pichai has decided to stay at Google after being aggressively courted by Twitter to join the fast-growing company as its VP of product, according to sources with knowledge of the situation.

Pichai, who is Google’s VP of product management in charge of Chrome and Chrome OS, had been Twitter’s top pick after longtime VP of product Jason Goldman stepped down last month, as NetworkEffect reported last week.

Suffering from employee departures for companies like Facebook or their own start-up efforts, the search giant seems to have been able in this instance to persuade its talent to stay put.

While I haven’t been able to nail down what exactly Google paid to keep Pichai, it was apparently a significant increase to his previous compensation package. Google declined to comment on the matter.

Stories of Google paying millions of dollars to keep key employees are not uncommon these days. And Pichai is said to be particularly valued by Google CEO Eric Schmidt and SVP of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg.

Meanwhile, Twitter–which has many product leaders within the company, including co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams–will continue its search for one product VP to rule them all.

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”