Google's ad head Sridhar Ramaswamy quits, to join Greylock Partners

IIT Madras alumnus Sridhar Ramaswamy, who headed Google’s search and display ad operations and developing new revenue sources, on Tuesday left the company after a 15-year stint with the Silicon Valley tech behemoth, several media reports stated. Ramaswamy will join venture capital firm Greylock Partners as a partner and will be based out of Cupertino, California.

Another IIT Madras alumnus Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Google’s business-applications unit, will replace Ramaswamy. Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Alphabet, who hails from Chennai, is also an IIT alumnus.

Ramaswamy oversaw all of Google’s advertising and commerce products, which include search, display and video advertising, analytics, shopping, payments, and travel. He joined Google as an engineer in 2003, and has been an integral part of the growth of AdWords and Google’s advertising business.

Prior to joining Google, Ramaswamy was director of engineering for the analytics platform at E.piphany. He also held research positions at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies and Bell Communications Research (Bellcore). He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the IIT Madras, and did his master’s of science and PhD in computer science from Brown University, US.

Prior to joining Google, Raghavan worked at IBM, Verity and Yahoo! He holds a bachelor's degree in technology from IIT Madras and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in electrical engineering and computer science. 

Raghavan was also a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University. He has co-authored textbooks, Randomized Algorithms and Introduction to Information Retrieval.