Indian American Neal Mohan Joins Club of Indian-origin CEOs as Head of YouTube amid Tech Layoffs in USA

YouTube’s head Susan Wojcicki, one of Google’s first few employees, has stepped down from the ‘CEO’ post and handed over the reins to Indian American Neal Mohan, an undisputed digital advertising expert. She was at the helm of developing YouTube as the world’s largest and most popular video streaming service portal for the past 9 years. Interestingly, she has been with Google starting from the day she had rented out her garage to the Stanford graduates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who eventually fathered the search giant. 

“Indian American Neal Mohan, who is currently the Chief Product Officer at YouTube, will ascend to the hotseat of CEO soon and join the growing league of Indian-origin CEOs leading global conglomerates. His promotion to YouTube CEO followed the appointment of Indian American Ravi Kumar  Singisetti as Cognizant’s global CEO in January. What’s the most ironical is that America’s tech behemoths continue to bet on the Indian-origin talent at the C-level, whereas tremors of layoffs in the US tech corridor are affecting Indians; as statistically, over 70% of H1B visas are issued to Indian techies,” said Sourav Agarwal, the Editor of Travel Beats, a leading Indian Diaspora portal.

Who is YouTube’s new CEO Neal Mohan? What is the salary of YouTube’s CEO? Netizens started googling these queries after the news broke out. Born in Lucknow, the city of biryani and kebabs; he is a Stanford graduate with a BS degree in Electrical Engineering. He is also an MBA alumnus of Stanford University. In his role as Chief Product Officer, he has been responsible for the growth and development of YouTube products, including YouTube Premium and YouTube TV. He took the user experience of YouTube on mobile, desktop and TV devices to the next level. His business acumen, strategic decisions, and leadership aligned with the vision of Susan Wojcicki has unlocked the potential of YouTube as a key source of revenue for Google.

“Neal has a wonderful sense for our product, our business, our creator and user communities, and our employees. He will be a terrific leader for YouTube,” Susan Wojcicki spoke highly of her top lieutenant while announcing her resignation.

Neal Mohan’s career taking off as YouTube’s CEO is the culmination of his pursuit of American Dream that had begun as a senior analyst at Accenture in 1996. Following a stint of 1.5 years at Accenture, he joined DoubleClick Inc where he went on to become the Senior Vice President for Strategy and Product Management. The acquisition of DoubleClick by Google set a new milestone in his life in 2008. Since then, his career graph has seen only highs. Google appointed him as Senior Vice President for Display and Video Ads.

Not many people know that Google retained Neal Mohan and paid him a whopping $100 million stock bonus when Twitter was trying to rope in as chief product officer in its days of struggle. He kept the ball rolling for Google’s Display and Video advertising business by dint of strategic solutions that he developed and implemented for online advertisers and media partners worldwide, until he was given the office of YouTube’s Chief Product Officer in 2015.

One of his most significant contributions to YouTube is YouTube Shorts that he incubated to counter the threat of TikTok’s meteoric popularity. As a result, YouTube Shorts was launched first in India in September 2020 as the short-form-content division of the video-streaming service. YouTube Shorts has grown from a daily count of 3.5 billion views to 30 views per day. The series of developments led by Neal Mohan included monetization of YouTube Shorts on the basis of a revenue-sharing model for content creators. At a White House conference in 2022, he represented Google in unveiling “a new content moderation policy at YouTube, targeting violent extremist content on the site”.

Headquartered in San Mateo, about 20 miles south of San Francisco, YouTube generated US$ 29 billion revenues in 2022 alone, that is nearly 11.35% of Google’s total revenue in the same year, under the collective leadership of Susan Wojcicki and Neal Mohan.

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