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Alphabet, Microsoft, Starbucks & now YouTube — Indian-origin CEOs rule roost in Silicon Valley

Former chief product officer at YouTube, Stanford graduate Neal Mohan played key role in introducing subscription model to Alphabet-owned streaming giant.

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New Delhi: After a a nine-year stint, Susan Wojcicki stepped down Thursday as chief executive officer (CEO) of YouTube. She will be replaced by Indian-American Neal Mohan (49), who was until now the Alphabet-owned streaming platform’s chief product officer.

Mohan joins an elite list of top tech executives with Indian roots.

Besides Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, other prominent names on the list include Parag Agrawal, who was CEO of Twitter before his bitter fallout with its new owner, Elon Musk.

Leena Nair of British-Indian origin is the global CEO of French luxury fashion house Chanel. She is an alumna of XLRI (Xavier School of Management), Jamshedpur, and Walchand College of Engineering in Sangli.

Hyderabad-born Shantanu Narayen heads tech giant Adobe, which counts the hugely popular PDF editor and Photoshop among its flagship products. He studied at Hyderabad’s Osmania University.

Arvind Krishna, an alumnus of IIT Kanpur, took over as CEO of IBM in April 2020 and was appointed chairman in January 2021.

Also on the list is Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of Micron Technology and co-founder of SanDisk. He attended BITS Pilani and the University of California, Berkeley.

Other notable CEOs include Vas Narasimhan of Swiss pharma giant Novartis, Amrapali Gan of OnlyFans, Laxman Narasimhan of Starbucks, Nikesh Arora of cloud computing firm Palo Alto Networks, Motorola’s Sanjay Jha, Raghu Raghuram of cloud computing giant VMware and Jayshree Ullal of Arista Networks.

Chennai-born Indra Nooyi was also a prominent name on the list till she stepped down as CEO of Pepsico in 2018. She is an alumnus of Madras Christian College and Yale School of Management. Another prominent name on the list is Ajay Banga, who served as CEO of Mastercard for a decade before announcing his retirement in December 2021.


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Wojcicki’s Indian connection

Wojcicki, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures, announced her decision in a tweet, saying, “Today, after nearly 25 years at Google, I’m stepping back to start a new chapter. I’m inspired every day by creators around the world who bring people together on YouTube. It’s been an honour to have a front row seat to this incredible community.”

Her departure comes at a time when YouTube is fending off stiff competition from other short video platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels.

In an email to YouTube employees, Wojcicki said she is looking forward to a more active role in looking after her family, health and personal projects. She, however, will be taking on the role of an advisor for YouTube and Google.

Google was conceptualised in 1998 in Wojcicki’s garage in California which she rented out to then PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

In her final blog, Wojcicki recalled her journey thus, “Twenty-five years ago I made the decision to join a couple of Stanford graduate students who were building a new search engine. Their names were Larry and Sergey. I saw the potential of what they were building, which was incredibly exciting, and although the company had only a few users and no revenue, I decided to join the team. It would be one of the best decisions of my life.”

Wojcicki, too, has an Indian connection. As a college student in 1993, she interned with the photo section of India Today Group in New Delhi. In 2018, she posted a picture from her stint captioned, “Remembering when I was an intern India Today over 25 years ago!”

Wojcicki (54) is the daughter of American journalist Esther Wojcicki, who is known to be the “Godmother of Silicon Valley”.

Who is new YouTube CEO Neal Mohan

Prior to this, Mohan was chief product officer at YouTube where he headed teams responsible for user experience, trust and safety issues.

A Stanford graduate with a degree in electrical engineering, he completed his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

He joined Microsoft briefly after his MBA and was soon made a part of the digital marketing firm DoubleClick, which Google acquired for a whopping $3.1 billion in April 2007.

After playing a major role in this transition, Mohan emerged as a key figure overseeing all of Google’s video advertising business. He also played an essential role in introducing the subscription model to YouTube.

(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)


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