Indian American Neal Mohan is new YouTube head

Neal Mohan is taking over as the head of the Google-owned video sharing platform – YouTube.

With this, Mohan will be joining the elite list of global tech chiefs of Indian origin such as Google parent Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, IBM’s Arvind Krishna, and Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen.

He is taking over from Susan Wojcicki whose departure marks an end of an era at the world’s largest video platform. Wojcicki has a long history with Google (now Alphabet), having rented garage space in her parent’s house to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to start the company in 1998. She joined the search giant as its 16th employee a year later.

In a letter sent to YouTube’s employees, Wojcicki said she was leaving in order to “start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about.”

During her tenure, YouTube became increasingly important to the business for Google, which bought the site in 2006, and Alphabet, the holding company that houses both of them: In 2022, YouTube generated $29.2 billion in ad sales — more than 10 percent of Alphabet’s total revenue.

Wojcicki’s departure also has meaningful symbolism for Google and tech in general. For years, she has been one of the very few women to operate a huge tech business. And she was an integral part of Google’s founding — she famously rented out her Silicon Valley garage to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, and joined the company as its 16th employee a year later.

Prior to this, Mohan served as YouTube’s chief product officer, responsible for the platform’s products, user experience, and trust and safety initiatives.