SARATOGA — Do you know Paraag Marathe? You don’t know Paraag Marathe.

“Hey, it’s the same oven!” he exclaimed.

We had just entered the front door of Mountain Mike’s pizza parlor. Marathe grew up blocks away. But this was far more than Marathe’s old stomping ground. This was much more.

“I don’t know how long it’s been since I was here,” Marathe said, gazing around. “I helped my dad set up this place. I hired the first employees, I picked out this furniture. I picked this color scheme.”

Yes, it turns out there is a lot that all of us don’t know about Paraag Marathe. I used to think that was exactly how he and the 49ers wanted it. But as we sat down for a nearly two-hour lunch at the restaurant that this family once owned, a lot of insightful doors opened up into the team’s mystery man.

Marathe’s official title with the 49ers is “Chief Strategy Officer And Executive Vice-President of Football Operations.” His unofficial title is “Senior Associate Lightning Rod.” As basically the right-hand man of owner Jed York, Marathe has been given credit for helping the Levi’s Stadium project come together and blamed for … well, just about everything else. Fans and various media voices have accused him of meddling in the college draft, lurking in the coaching booth on Sundays, spying on behalf of York and/or undermining the operation in just about any conspiracy theory you want to offer.

Do you know Paraag Marathe? You don’t know Paraag Marathe. Through all the lightning bolts, the man himself has been polite whenever encountered but mostly silent, very rarely granting interviews. But he agreed to sit down with me when I suggested that we do the interview at one of the pizza places that his immigrant father and mother operated on Saratoga Sunnyvale Road throughout his childhood. We had great fun talking about his “pizza knowledge” and his memories of that time. (See accompanying video.) But we also talked about his family’s back story, one that may go against the image many 49ers fans have of him as a privileged intellectual with degrees from Cal and Stanford. Like our San Francisco 49ers Facebook page for more 49ers news, commentary and conversation.

Marathe does indeed own those degrees. But his upbringing was hardly one of entitlement. His parents immigrated from India and pursued the American dream from the ground up. They endured business and career success mixed with tragedy, while giving loving support to their two children as they pitched in to help the family succeed. It provides a good look into what makes Marathe tick. It also explains how he has become the second-most powerful executive on the business side of the 49ers organization — although he might argue that point, as we’ll see in a few paragraphs.

Mountain Mike’s was the second restaurant owned by Vijay and Seema Marathe. The first was a Round Table Pizza just up the street, in a building that’s now a financial services company. Vijay had to sell it when his lease expired and moved half a mile away. At the old Round Table, Paraag would often stand behind the counter and work the cash register. Nothing unusual about that — except that he was only 12 years old at the time and slightly under five feet tall.

“I could barely see above the register,” Marathe said. “It was almost like a gimmick for customers at first because I looked really young back then. It was a like a little kid was running the restaurant. But we would churn out 200 or 250 pizzas on a Friday evening and there were times I really would run the whole operation. It’s crazy now when I think about it.”

Marathe worked long hours at the pizza businesses while attending Lynbrook High School. That way, his father could keep his other job as an electronics engineer — a job that Vijay ultimately had to quit, anyway, because the pizza business was so labor intensive and many of the teenagers they employed didn’t always show up. Marathe’s dad needed to be there just in case.

“Which is why all my guilt came in,” Marathe said. “It was like, why would I be with my buddies in the evening when I should be working to give my dad a break?”

It’s the story of hundreds of immigrant Silicon Valley families. But this one had a new twist. After Vijay and Seema pushed themselves so hard to send their children through college, they wondered why in the heck Paraag wanted to pursue a career with an NFL team. It was a dream he’d had since he was ringing up those pepperoni specials while the 49ers games played on the projection big screen TV.

“In Indian-American culture,” Marathe said, “everyone’s got to be a doctor or engineer … or maybe a lawyer. Like, working in sports, my whole family, the ones who are in India and everywhere else, they just thought this was a hobby.”

His parents obviously came around and are proud today. But reading between the lines, you can see that Marathe was out to prove a point — both to those folks who chuckled at the kid behind the register and to the family members who were mystified about why such a bright young man was so obsessed with … a football salary cap? For complete 49ers coverage follow us on Flipboard.

Do you know Paraag Marathe? You don’t know Paraag Marathe. He’s a competitive guy who, while pitching for his high school baseball team, sparked a brawl in a game when he followed his coach’s orders to throw at an opposing batter. But it was Marathe’s obsession with front office NFL matters that fueled his rapid rise in the 49ers organization after he joined it 17 years ago as a jack-of-all-trades numbers guy who knew finances and statistics and how the NFL dealt with both. He became expert in negotiating contract terms. Marathe eventually became Chief Operating Officer and finally team president. He and.York were considered hotshot young wizards when the 49ers went to the Super Bowl after the 2012 season.

Then came 2014. A clumsy offload of coach Jim Harbaugh led to the 49ers losing 25 of their next 32 games. And the two young wizards conjured up only loathing among the fan base. Marathe lost his president’s title — but is still a major front office presence.

So what does Marathe do, exactly? If you ask around the league, the people who deal with him tend to respect him and his intelligence. Yet some of those people ask the same question. So could he please enlighten us? He could.

“The lion’s share of my job,” Marathe said, “is what it’s been for a long period of time — chief negotiator, monitoring the salary cap and figuring out our Collective Bargaining Agreement compliance with the league. The other part of my job has evolved over time. In the beginning, I was a troubleshooter looking at things where we could make things more efficient and better. And then I was finding a location for a new stadium and doing the stuff for the Levi’s project.”

With Levi’s complete, Marathe dipped into other branches of the 49ers’ multi-tentacled operation, including a stadium-technology startup and a piece of Sacramento’s pro soccer team. So why do 49ers fans think he’s to blame for so much of the team’s recent misery? Probably because he has participated in the coaching searches that resulted in Jim Tomsula and Chip Kelly’s miserable seasons — and remains involved in day-to-day elements of the operation under new general manager John Lynch and new coach Kyle Shanahan.

“I’d say 75 of my job is football related,” Marathe said, “because the cap goes up and up and up and now we’re at $165 million and accounting for every dollar and penny takes a lot of time.”

Is criticism of him fair when the team does a faceplant?

“Yes, absolutely,” Marathe said. “We’re measured by wins and losses. … We haven’t won and we have to get that straightened out … (but) I’m not the spokesperson for football. That’s John and Kyle’s job and they’re really good at it. And that’s not my job. My job is to do my job and do it so I can be useful and a utility player for them.”

Which is where things get foggy. How, exactly, does Marathe define the term “utility player?” He says it means that he takes orders from Lynch and Shanahan if they need him to research a potential player’s expected compensation and whether it fits into the 49ers’ template — or anything else they might ask. For more 49ers and other breaking news get our mobile app for free from the Apple app store or the Google Play store.

“I support those guys in everything football,” Marathe said. “I’m our chief contract negotiator and manage our salary cap and help them in all our player personnel decisions. And you’d better have your ‘A’ game because they’re going to challenge you. It’s their show and I’m here to support them. … The only time I do something with football is because someone wants me to do it. There are certain things within game management that I’ve done, but only at the request of the head coach.”

Out of respect for the York family and coaches, Marathe also keeps his mouth shut in public. The practical effect, however, is that Marathe becomes an empty vessel for fans and media to fill up with castigation for things that he might or might not have actually done. At some point, he surely must want to speak up and clarify whether that’s true.

“Is it frustrating?” Marathe said. “That’s one of the things I learned from Round Table when I was 12 years old. People were counting me out because they thought I couldn’t do that job. I learned how to just focus on doing the best I can. I can’t sit here and tell you that it doesn’t hurt. My wife and my daughter, my in-laws and my parents do live a stone’s throw away from where we are right now. They hear and read things. That hurts. I’m still human. But all I can do is know that the sun rises and sun sets — and focus on doing the best job I can.”

Do you know Paraag Marathe? You don’t know Paraag Marathe. He gained the best perspective, sadly, when his sister died in 2005 after years in the grip of anorexia. That was the Marathe family tragedy. As the condition of Shilpa Marathe progressed, Paraag had difficulty dealing with her situation. He considered it grim irony that his family was in the food service business while at home, Shilpa had an eating disorder that made her so thin and weak, Vijay had to carry her upstairs to bed every night.

“Because I was really into my job at the time,” Paraag said, “I became good at blocking it out of my mind, compartmentalizing. I probably didn’t get at peace with it until 2012, 2013, 2014 … and then I kind of had that moment where I felt like I had this voice because I’m in this industry where … no one talks about mental illness that often. And being in an immigrant family, there’s no such thing as mental anxiety or mental issues. You should just do or not do. There’s nothing else. And being a male, to be able to talk about anorexia … I felt I had a really good platform to be heard. So I started to get involved and there’s a couple of boards that I joined.”

The two organizations, Andrea’s Voice and Project Heal, have websites to consult for those dealing with anorexia in their own families. But Marathe says the first step is “to talk about it because I kept it inside for many years.”

By now, the lunch was almost over. Marathe kibitzed a bit with the restaurant’s current owner, Eil Abbasi, who bought the Mountain Mike’s outlet from Marathe’s parents a while ago. Looking back on it, Marathe said, his pizza experience was exhausting but invaluable.

“I honestly felt like my third parent was Round Table Pizza,” Marathe said. “It was more influential in my life than anything I can think of, including school and graduate school. … You know, I was interviewing prospective employees when I was 13 or 14 years old, hiring delivery drivers. … Knowing I was being counted out but knowing if you keep your head down and focused on what’s doing right and not listen to the noise, that’s what you need.”

As we wrapped up our interview, he asked: “How’d you like the pizza?”

Marathe then told one final story. Both of his family’s pizza places were not far from Saratoga High School, so the football team often showed up for postgame meals. One of the Saratoga High players who Marathe served was a frosh-soph wide receiver named Kyle Shanahan.

Shanahan is the new 49ers coach. Does he know Paraag Marathe? Shanahan didn’t then. He does now. After lunch at Mountain Mike’s, maybe we all do.