What Did Google CEO Sundar Pichai Reportedly Say to Staff?

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in an email Tuesday that parent company Alphabet planned to slow down hiring and that employees “need to be more entrepreneurial,” according to TechCrunch.

The outlet cited reports of the leaked email from CNBC and the Wall Street Journal. Google confirmed the authenticity of the email in a statement to Entrepreneur.

“We need to be more entrepreneurial working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days,” Pichai wrote to staff.

Pichai also said in the leaked note he was nervous about the broader economy and that the company will “be slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year” while focusing on “engineering, technical and other critical roles,” for 2022 and 2023.

Alphabet is the latest in a series of tech companies to pull back aggressively after a pandemic-era hiring bonanza: From the end of March 2021 to March 2022, Alphabet reported hiring over 23,000 people, according to the company’s latest earnings report.

But, the party is way over: its shares are down about 22 percent year to date. However, Pichai did write that they hired 10,000 people in Q2, CNBC noted.

Entrepreneurs have also likely had to be more entrepreneurial as the broader economic environment has filtered down from larger, publicly-traded tech companies to startups, TechCrunch reported.

“Scarcity breeds clarity—this is something we have been saying since the earliest days of Google,” Pichai reportedly added.