Google Cloud employees were baffled when they learned that their next boss would be Thomas Kurian, an executive who struggled to shepherd Silicon Valley mainstay Oracle Corp. into the promised land of internet computing.
It was November 2018 and the cloud division’s then-chief Diane Greene and Kurian held a question-and-answer session with staff who worried about his impending leadership. “A lot of people have concerns about the fact that you came from Oracle, which is a very different culture,” one person said to Kurian. “So how are you going to preserve the culture at Google Cloud?” At a previous meeting that month, an employee described the hire as alarming and sought reassurances from Greene that Kurian was up for the job.
