Indian Origin Neal Mohan Appointed as New YouTube CEO

YouTube has a new CEO, after Susan Wojcicki stepped down after spending nine years in the position. Wojcicki’s successor is her longtime Indian-American lieutenant Neal Mohan.

An electric engineering graduate of Stanford University, he will join a growing group of CEOs of US-based multinational corporations who are of Indian descent, including Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe, and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet. Before leaving her position as CEO of PepsiCo in 2018, Indra Nooyi had been there for 12 years.

In a blog post, Wojcicki, 54 has cited her vision for after YouTube, stating that she would be focusing on “family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about.” She served as a senior vice president for ad products at Google, before her stint as the CEO of YouTube.

In an email to YouTube employees, she wrote, “After nearly twenty-five years here, I have decided to step down as the head of YouTube.”

“We have an incredible leadership team on YouTube which gives me enough confidence to do this.” She said. “Having a great leadership team was one of my first priorities when I joined the team. Neal Mohan was among those and he will be taking over as the SVP and the new head of YouTube,” Wojcicki wrote.

Mohan had become YouTube’s Chief Product Officer in 2015. He joined Google with the DoubleClick acquisition in 2015.

Since then, she continued, "he has established an outstanding product and UX team, played key roles in the launch of some of our biggest products, including YouTube TV, YouTube Music, Premium, and Shorts, and has led our Trust and Safety team, ensuring that YouTube lives up to its responsibility as a global platform.

He has a fantastic understanding of our company, our workers, our creative and user communities, and our product, she said.

She asserted her confidence in Neal’s leadership. Susan Wojcicki had joined Google alongside few Stanford graduates who were working on building a new search engine.

She mentioned them in her post, stating that she’d seen the potential of what they were building. Larry and Sergey, she wrote, were building something incredibly exciting, and while the company did not have any income and only few users, she had decided to join the team. She went on to say that it had been one of the best decisions in her life.

She has been the CEO of YouTube since 2014, and she will now serve as an advisor to Google and Alphabet. YouTube's ad revenue increased to USD 28.8 billion last year thanks to her leadership.