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Sundar Pichai
Sundar Pichai GOOG
Chief Executive Officer & Director, Google
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‘Your choices...’: Stanford students walk out during Sundar Pichai's graduation speech

📅 Jun 14, 2026 ET Digital 12 MIN 3 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
A group of students walked out of the graduation ceremony while Google CEO Sundar Pichai was delivering the commencement ...

What Sundar Pichai said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, delivered a commencement speech at Stanford University on June 14, 2026, during which over 100 students walked out in protest over Project Nimbus, a cloud and AI deal with the Israeli government. Pichai did not address the protest directly. He shared three personal filters for life: choose optimism, work on hard things, and do what excites you. He recounted his early uncertainty, a story of skipping class to drive to Vegas, and his experience building Chrome with a small team against consensus. He emphasized that few moments are truly critical, like choosing a partner or a career pivot. He also mentioned his passion for technology access through Android. He concluded by encouraging the class of 2026 to follow what excites them.

Key takeaways

  1. Pichai said only a few moments in life are truly critical, like choosing a partner or a career pivot.
  2. Pichai advised choosing optimism as a filter for life decisions.
  3. Pichai recommended gravitating toward working on hard things, citing his work on Chrome.
  4. Pichai said to do the thing that excites you, referencing Android.
  5. Pichai did not address the student walkout over Project Nimbus in his speech.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
2026 graduating class year timeline 2:03
2020 year of his first commencement speech timeline 2:03

Chapters

  1. 0:00Introduction and three filters
  2. 0:42Student walkout over Project Nimbus
  3. 2:03Personal reflections and advice
Sundar Pichai 0:00 ↗
While those moments add texture to your journey, they rarely determine the course of your life. But if you're able to filter the signal through the noise, you can nudge your life in these moments into having the impact you want. So today, I want to share three simple filters I've applied to my own life. Three filters that have helped me get more moments right than wrong and took some of the pressure off. First, choose optimism. The second filter is to gravitate towards working on hard things. And the third filter I use when all else is equal, do the thing that excites you.

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Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Pichai, S. (2026, June 14). ‘Your choices...’: Stanford students walk out during Sundar Pichai's graduation speech [Interview transcript]. ET Digital. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/995588/

MLA

Sundar Pichai. "‘Your choices...’: Stanford students walk out during Sundar Pichai's graduation speech." ET Digital, 14 Jun. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/995588/.

BibTeX 
@misc{pichai2026_995588,
  author       = {Sundar Pichai},
  title        = {‘Your choices...’: Stanford students walk out during Sundar Pichai's graduation speech},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, ET Digital. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {jun},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/995588/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}