Indian-American Neal Mohan taking over as YouTube CEO as Susan Wojcicki steps down

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki on Thursday announced that she is stepping down from her role after spending nine years as the head of the global online video-sharing and social media platform and will be replaced by her longtime Indian-American lieutenant Neal Mohan.

Wojcicki, 54, said in her blog post that she will focus on "family, health, and personal projects I'm passionate about." Wojcicki, who was previously a senior vice president for ad products at Google, became CEO of YouTube in 2014.

“Today, after nearly 25 years here, I’ve decided to step back from my role as the head of YouTube,” Wojcicki wrote in an email to YouTube employees.

“The time is right for me, and I feel able to do this because we have an incredible leadership team in place at YouTube,” she said.

“When I joined YouTube nine years ago, one of my first priorities was bringing in an incredible leadership team. Neal Mohan was one of those leaders, and he’ll be the SVP and new head of YouTube,” Wojcicki wrote announcing her replacement at the giant and popular video host platform.

Mohan joined Google with the DoubleClick acquisition in 2007. He became YouTube’s Chief Product Officer in 2015.

“Since then, he has set up a top-notch product and UX team, played pivotal roles in the launch of some of our biggest products, including YouTube TV, YouTube Music and Premium and Shorts, and has led our Trust and Safety team, ensuring that YouTube lives up to its responsibility as a global platform,” she said.

“He has a wonderful sense for our product, our business, our creator and user communities, and our employees," she said.

Neal will be a terrific leader for YouTube, Wojcicki wrote.

Wojcicki joined Google 25 years ago along with 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,” she said.

Having served as YouTube CEO since 2014, she would now assume an advisory role at Google and Alphabet. Under her leadership, ad revenue of YouTube jumped to USD 28.8 billion last year.

Mohan is a graduate in electric engineering from Stanford University.

He will join a growing list of Indian-origin CEOs at the helm of US-based global giants, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Indra Nooyi had served as PepsiCo's CEO for 12 years before stepping down in 2018.