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George says their journey to America was not easy, but he has benefitted from having his twin brother, whom he calls his"best friend," as a companion and soulmate.Growing up in India, George Kurian and his twin brother Thomas enjoyed playing pranks at home and in school by taking advantage of the fact that they look so much alike.
He's joking, of course. The Kurian brothers have far more serious matters to think about as CEOs of two tech behemoths going through difficult transitions, which underscore the parallel paths they've taken since leaving India."We have common themes in our two journeys, him at Google and me at NetApp," George said.
These are tough challenges, and George Kurian says he has benefitted from the feedback he and his brother still routinely give one another."We've helped each other think through things," he said.It's a bond they shared growing up in Bangalore and in their journey to America."I would not have had such an easy time coming to the US if I had not come with him," George Kurian said.
George worked for Cisco for nine years, before joining NetApp in 2011. When he was offered the CEO post, he checked with Thomas who he said told him,"Listen, they wouldn't make a change and give you the opportunity to be CEO if everything was going swimmingly well." George Kurian is steering NetApp toward a more cloud-enabled future. When he joined the company in 2011, NetApp was focused"on selling infrastructure to telecom providers and had for the most part not done much with the big cloud providers, like Amazon, Google and Microsoft."
But the company's transformation has also been bumpy. NetApp has reported a year-over-year drop in revenue in the last two quarters. The company's stock has slipped about 9% year to date.