Ryan Joe contributed
One of Google’s key ad executives is riding off into the VC sunset.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP for ads and commerce, will depart the Googleplex for a role with Greylock Ventures, Forbes reports.
Prabhakar Raghavan, VP of Google cloud apps, will become the new ads honcho.
“I’ve long admired how Sridhar and his team have led innovation in advertising for our industry, built on the most amazing infrastructure,” Raghavan said in a statement. “I’m honored to take on this very important mission to help billions of people find useful, relevant commercial information and ensure that users, creators, publishers and advertisers are able to thrive in an ecosystem built on transparency, trust and value.”
Ramaswamy helped Google’s ad platform business grow from $1.5 billion to $100 billion over 15 years. “Google’s ads business remains strong and I am happy to transition this world-class product and engineering organization to a leader of Prabhakar’s caliber,” Ramaswamy said in a statement.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai also gave his vote of confidence in a statement, citing Prabhakar’s “incredible management experience, and the deep technical expertise to match.”
Meanwhile, Ramaswamy will help Greylock work with companies focused on big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence and analytics.