Google's New Blockchain Head Joins Leena Nair And Parag Aggarwal to Become The Next Indian-origin Executive in Silicon Valley

Tech giant Google is entering the market for blockchain and other next-gen distributed computing and storage technologies. According to an internal email accessed by Bloomberg News, the IIT Madras alumnus will become the “founder leader” of Labs - a business division that houses Google’s Virtual and Augmented Reality initiatives. 

After Parag Aggarwal of Twitter, and Leena Nair of Chanel, Sivakumar Venkatraman will become another Indian-origin executive to head top-level operations at a Silicon Valley firm.

Venkatraman joined Google in 2003 as a software engineer, and since then he has worked in various divisions of the company. His most recent responsibility was in the firm’s core business of search advertising.

Who is Shivakumar Venkatraman?

Venkatraman - now 52 - completed his B.S. in Computer Science from IIT Madras in 1990. After that, he joined the University of Wisconsin at Madison and spent six years there, completing his MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science. His first break at Silicon Valley came in the form of a summer internship at Hewlett Packard.

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His first full-time role was with IBM, where he joined in 1996 as a software engineer and worked till 2000. After two short stints at lesser-known tech firms, Venkatraman joined Google’s search advertising division in 2003 as a software engineer. He went on to become the Vice President and General Manager of the division where he worked for 18 years and seven months. 

Shivakumar was born in Hyderabad and did his schooling at Hyderabad Public School in Begumpet. He lives in California with his wife and two children - Nidhya and Kaushik. They live a quiet life, avoiding any direct public appearance. However, in a report published by Fox KTVU, it was revealed that both Nidhya and Kaushik are deeply interested in robotics.

Shivakumar Venkatraman’s Professional Journey

Between 1996 and 2000, when Venkatraman was a software engineer at IBM, he became part of the group that developed IBM’s federated query optimizers and other associated technologies. In 2002, he also served as a visiting faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. 

However, his actual legacy lies in the work that he did as a Software Engineer at Google. In his 19-year-long career with Alphabet.Inc, he has played a significant role in the development of many critical technologies related to databases. As a result, it didn’t come as a surprise to anyone when the veteran was given the opportunity to lead Labs in January 2022.

Google Code Jam - Launching Soon! 

Some of Venkatraman’s contributions at Google

• Scalable distributed database management system - F1
• Scalable data warehousing solution - Mesa
• Scalable log processing system - Photon

Final words…

Even though Dr. Venkatraman lives a low-key life with his family, his contributions to the world of tech will be remembered for generations to come. The fact that Google has finally decided to enter Web3 with him as the lead shows how much the firm trusts his responsible shoulders. Speculations are already ripe that with Venkatraman in charge of Labs, we will finally get to see Google’s very own cryptocurrency.

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