Reaching a human customer support executive is virtually impossible at big tech companies, but things are different if you’re a big tech CEO yourself.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has personally responded to a complaint on X by Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo over Google Meet’s audio issues. “At Quora we recently tested switching from Zoom to Google Meet for a week,” Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo posted on X. “Google Meet is better in many small ways, but worse in one big way: audio quality, particularly background noise cancellation and echoing. That kills it so we are staying on Zoom!” he added.
But just twenty five minutes later, someone got back — and it was the Google CEO himself. “Hey Adam, will follow up offline as haven’t experienced this, as Reed notes below it works pretty well in my experience, we will debug to understand the root cause and fix. Thanks for flagging,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.
Before Pichai had responded, a Google Waymo engineer had already responded to Adam D’Angelo’s post. “Really? we literally never have an issue with background noise. in fact it’s remarkably good, can’t hear dogs or coughing or leaf blowers… surprising you had an issue,” he had said.
It appears that the Quora CEO was happy with the quick responses by Google employees, and even the CEO himself. “Thank you!! Would love to switch if this is fixed!” he replied to Pichai.
Now Google is one of the most valuable companies in the world, and runs dozens of products with billions of users. It’s understandably hard for them to respond personally to all their users with their tech problems. But even for a company this size, it’s unusual for a CEO himself to respond to such a complaint, even it came from a fellow CEO. And the fact that Sundar Pichai can still respond to such issues within half an hour shows that Google might be slowly regaining some of scrappy startup culture that it once had.