43-year-old Dennis Woodside got his start at Google back in 2003, and ever since he’s been heavily involved in the company’s core business: advertising. He doesn’t have much of an online presence (he’s without a publicly-active Google+ profile, and his LinkedIn account was recently taken offline), but he has managed Google’s relationships with major partners and advertisers, and for a long time he was instrumental in getting international advertisers to get online and spend money with Google to promote their products. Unlike many of his Google colleagues, Woodside doesn’t have much knowledge of the technical side of hardware and software, and, unlike most in his position, he doesn’t have a business degree, either. Instead, Woodside graduated from Cornell University in 1991 with a degree in Industrial Relations (he was also a triathlete), and he went on from there to Stanford University — a Google favorite — to get a law degree in 1995. Fresh out of law school, Woodside worked as a law clerk for the US Court of Appeals in New York City, and was involved with cases such as the first bombing of the Word Trade Center, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

As shown on Woodside’s LinkedIn profile, after a stint as an attorney at a Los Angeles-based law firm dealing with mergers and acquisitions (experience that would surely help him manage Google’s acquisition of Motorola), he got his start in business with a role as Associate Principle at McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm, for over 5 years. McKinsey would be Woodside’s stepping stone to Google, and ultimately his new position as Motorola Mobility’s CEO.

In 2003, as a director of business operations at Google, Woodside was tasked with running the still-new search company’s field operations for Central Europe, Russia, North Africa, and the Middle East. He lasted until 2005 before getting promoted; in that time he helped Google go international by opening ten new offices overseas. Afterwards, he remained abroad, taking up a position as Google’s managing director of emerging markets before heading sales and operations of the search company’s UK and Irish unit until 2009. If it’s not clear already, Woodside’s spent plenty of time outside the US — he says his “global perspective” makes him unique — and when abroad he spent much of his time in knowledge-sharing roles. As he said in a 2010 Paley Center for Media interview, this meant that he had to “work with advertisers to understand the potential of the web” and encouraging “them to experiment in ways they might not have been comfortable with in the past.” That’s something that most US companies are well aware of, but something that businesses in Turkey, for instance, are not as familiar with.