Hey there. Orianna here from Fortune.

When Arvind Jain, the now cofounder of Rubrik and Glean, landed a job at Google, he felt like an “imposter.” The engineer had moved to America from a small town in India and suddenly found himself surrounded by MIT and Stanford PhDs. So he made a point of quietly studying those around him.

And one of those people was a product manager who had just joined the company. His name was Sundar Pichai.

“We were together at Google for a long time. I knew him from when he joined as an individual contributor,” Jain told me.

“I thought that I got lucky, that somehow I got placed in this group of amazing people…And that was why I was trying to learn and observe, what makes one succeed?”

Of course, Pichai ended up becoming CEO of Google in August 2015, just over a decade after joining the company. And Jain was able to watch (and learn from) his rise to the top.

“What I learned by observing him was that the same attributes kept coming up—intensity, hard work. But also the ability to think big and have confidence,” Jain revealed. “You have to think crazy.”

And he says Pichai’s Google Chrome success proves that. At the time, the idea looked foolish on paper. Browsers were Microsoft’s territory, Netscape had already failed, and few inside Google thought it was worth the effort.

“I felt like, ‘that’s such a bad idea,’” he admitted. “I was not thinking big enough.”

Chrome went on to become the world’s most widely used browser—far bigger than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer—helping cement Pichai’s reputation inside Google, and paving the way for his eventual rise to CEO.

“You have to say: We’re going to do this thing which everybody thinks is stupid, maybe unrealistic,” Jain learned from the experience. “That’s when magic happens.”

And he says it underscores that thinking “crazy” is an attribute as important as grinding away—and one that Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin share with Pichai.

“They had no sort of constraints in their minds on what’s possible,” Jain added. “So I think that those were the two main things I learned: hard work, but then the disregard for normalcy and regular constraint thinking.”

—Orianna Rosa Royle
Success Associate Editor, Fortune

Got a career tip or dilemma? Get in touch: orianna.royle@fortune.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, TikTok, X, and Instagram.