Sridhar Ramaswamy, Advertising Chief of Google has ended his 15 years relationship with the company to join Greylock Partners as a venture partner. Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Google’s business-applications unit, will step into his role.
In 2003, Sridhar joined the ads team, at that time the revenue of ads group was $1.5 billion. He was named as the Advertising Chief in 2014, after Susan Wojcicki moved to YouTube. Last year, Google’s ad business totaled more than $95 billion.
Ramaswamy told Forbes he was joining Greylock due to a combination of close relationships with some of the firm’s partners as well as the desire to try something new after a run with Google Ads.
“It’s been a dream journey to be part of this amazing growth engine that is part of Google; it’s been an amazing business success,” Ramaswamy said. “The thing that was amazing was the focus on users even as it grew.”
Ramaswamy called the transition to VC a personal one as his children reached college age and he passed the decade-and-a-half milestone at Google. “I thought, I need to reinvent myself,” he says. “And a lot of what I was inspired by is working with people and working on innovative projects.”
In 2011, Prabhakar Raghavan joined Google. Before that, he ran Yahoo’s research lab where he worked on search, ad ranking, ad exchanges, and marketplaces. He also worked for IBM’s research arm for many years.
About the appointment of Raghavan as the new Advertising Chief, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said “I’ve worked with Prabhakar over many years now and can think of no better person to lead our monetization efforts, Prabhakar has incredible management experience and the deep technical expertise to match. He is the right person to succeed Sridhar, whose contributions over the past 15 years have helped grow Google into the company it is today.”
Raghavan holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He has also co-authored two textbooks on algorithms and information retrieval.
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