Sundar Pichai said he still wonders about some decisions Google has made — one of them being that the company never acquired Netflix.
The Google CEO gave a wide-ranging interview on the “All-In Podcast,” which posted Friday. At the end of the talk, host David Friedberg, a former Googler himself, asked Pichai about his proudest moments — and biggest regret.
“We debated Netflix at some point, super intensely inside,” Pichai said.
Pichai, who has been with the company since 2004 and became CEO about 10 years ago, said that acquisitions like Netflix were “debated hard” and the company “came close” to a deal. He later clarified that the decision against an acquisition was not a “regret,” though.
In 2014, UK-based technology research firm CCS Insight predicted that Google would acquire Netflix in 2015, but there weren’t widespread reports about acquisition discussions.
Since kicking off its global expansion in 2016, Netflix has been at the forefront of the entertainment industry and has hit over 300 million subscribers. While Google has entered the television space with its smart TV platform, Google TV, and its internet-based live streaming service, YouTube TV, it never fully broke into the traditional streaming space like Netflix.
Google has a long history of eating up the competition through high-profile acquisitions, but Netflix stands as one of the biggest names the tech giant has revealed it considered buying. Over the years, Google has successfully acquired a number of companies that have become central to its product line like Waze, Wiz, Nest, Fitbit, Android Inc., and YouTube.
Pichai added in the interview that he’s proud of the fact that Google has pushed the boundaries of technology. He said there aren’t many companies winning Nobel Prizes and conducting research and development that leads to the creation of businesses.
In 2024, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and director John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts the 3D structure of proteins. The tech giant also has departments like Google Research, which has invested in a wide range of topics and turned its findings into real-world products like wildfire detection and flood forecasting technology.
“I think we’ve done an extraordinary job at that, and we aspire to do that,” Pichai said in the podcast, adding that it’s a unique aspect of Google.
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