Sundar Pichai gave the 2026 commencement speech at Stanford University

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sundar Pichai (the CEO of Alphabet and Google) gave the 2026 commencement speech at Stanford University on June 14, 2026. There is a 14-minute YouTube video. That speech was published in Vital Speeches of the Day for August 2026, on pages 176 to 178 with the title Three Filters That Have Helped Me Get More Moments Right Than Wrong. Five headings from it are:

 

Very few moments in life are make or break

Choose optimism

Work on hard things

Do what excites you

Conclusion

 

The chorus from folksinger Kate Wolf’s song Here in California accurately has said:  

 

“Here in California

The fruit hangs heavy on the vine

There’s no gold, I thought I’d warn you

And the hills turn brown in the summertime”

 

Under Choose Optimism  (at 7:50)  Sundar’s seventh and eighth paragraphs instead say that:

 

“If you’re not from here, California is advertised as being really lush and green. But when I looked out the window, it was more...brown. I guess I said this out loud, I’m not sure why. My host, Mrs. Jane Earl, gently corrected me. ‘We prefer to call it golden,’ she said.

And that’s exactly what I mean by choosing optimism. It’s about reframing for the positive: Where I saw brown, she saw golden. This slight change of perspective had a huge ripple effect on how I thought about the world around me.”

A portrait of Sundar came from Wikimedia Commons.