By Martin Coulter
LONDON (Reuters) – The man charged with overseeing Google’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Asia has resigned after a decade in the role.
Matt Brittin first joined the tech giant in 2007 as head of its UK and Ireland operations, before progressing to vice president of Northern and Central Europe and then to EMEA president in 2014.
Prior to his time at Google (NASDAQ :), Brittin worked for a number of years as a consultant for McKinsey & Co, as well as as commercial director at Trinity Mirror, later renamed Reach PLC.
In a post announcing his departure on social media platform LinkedIn, Brittin praised colleagues whose advances in AI won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this week, and shared the advice one of Google’s co-founders gave him when he joined the company arrived.
“When I joined Google in January 2007, Larry Page advised me to ‘put the best people you can on important work, and get out of the way.’ It has been the privilege of my life to honor this: working with brilliant teams to help build technology that makes the world a better place,” he wrote.
Brittin said he would continue to lead Google’s EMEA business until a successor was chosen.
