Success tips from IIT-Madras alumnus and CEO of $61 billion company: 'People giving me jobs...'

An alum of IIT Madras and Brown University, Sridhar Ramaswamy was part of the early engineering team that built Google Search.

Sridhar Ramaswamy believes in taking on responsibilities even if he thinks he's not ready for them. In fact, the CEO of $61 billion cloud storage company Snowflake has the same advice for young professionals. Volunteering for a task or even applying for a job without proper preparation or the required qualifications may feel like a mistake, but it's a great strategy for your career growth and personal development, he said.

″All of my success in my life has come from people giving me jobs that I didn't think I deserved or qualified for," the 57-year-old recently said in LinkedIn's This Is Working video series. "The more you take responsibility and the more you're broad about what defines 'team' and 'success,' the more likely it is that somebody is going to say, 'You know, this is the person I want leading the next rung of the organisation.'"

An alum of IIT Madras and Brown University, Ramaswamy was part of the early engineering team that built Google Search. He had joined Google as a software engineer in 2003 and had worked his way up to a senior vice president role within eight years before quitting to co-found an AI-powered search engine called Neeva in 2019. It was meant to compete with Google.

Ramaswamy credited his success to repeatedly taking on roles and assuming responsibilities he had never handled before. When Snowflake bought Neeva in 2023, Ramaswamy became their senior vice-president of AI and in 2024 was promoted to CEO--another role he had no experience in.

"Sometimes you can say: 'Think ridiculously ambitious,'" he said. "It doesn't work everywhere, and sometimes you fall flat on your face. You've got to play the game of averages. If you try enough ambitious things, a bunch of them work out."