The fun part of Google's earnings call is seeing Sundar Pichai in a wild hat and shorts
Making billions of dollars is exciting stuff, but listening to CEOs talk about it to Wall Street analysts about it can be surprisingly dull. CEOs are cautious with their words. Analysts are wonky with their questions.
So Google does something fun with its quarterly conference call that most other public companies don't.
It uses its own online service YouTube to do a live audio broadcast. Since YouTube is mostly a video platform, that means that Google has YouTube as a canvas to post charts, graphs, videos, whatever it wants as part of its quarterly call.
So, it has some fun with these. It posts a photo collage of the Google executives speaking.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai's collage is still pretty conservative. There's corporate-collared Pichai, Pichai on stage speaking, wearing a hoodie (that's code for saying he's just an ordinary geek, same as any coder).
And then there's the fun shot, where he's wearing a wacky hat and shorts on a beach somewhere.
But former CFO Patrick Pichette had them both beat with photos of him tandem skydiving, in ski helmet, bike helmet, and on a safari. He looked like The Most Interesting Man in the World.
When he retired from Google in March 2015 to travel the world, his farewell memo shared on Google+ sparked a worldwide debate about work/life balance.
In it he called himself "a member of FWIO, the noble Fraternity of Worldwide Insecure Over-achievers" and looking at the photos, you get a sense of it.
