Neal Mohan (born 14 July 1973) is an Indian-American business executive who has been the chief executive officer of YouTube since February 2023. An engineer who spent most of his career building Google’s advertising business, he earlier ran YouTube’s products for eight years and oversaw the launch of YouTube TV, YouTube Music and Shorts.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Neal Mohan |
| Born | 14 July 1973, Lafayette, Indiana, United States |
| Age | 53 |
| Nationality | American |
| Indian roots | Parents from India; went to school in Lucknow for several years |
| Education | Stanford University (B.S. in electrical engineering, 1996; MBA, 2005) |
| Occupation | Business executive |
| Position | CEO of YouTube (since 2023) |
| Spouse | Hema Sareen Mohan |
| Children | 3 |
Early Life
He was born in Lafayette, Indiana, where his father was doing a doctorate at Purdue University, and grew up in the United States until he was about twelve. In the mid-1980s the family moved back to India and settled in Lucknow, where he studied at St Francis’ College. He has recalled having to learn Hindi from scratch and being fascinated by computers and video games.
Education
He returned to America for university and took a degree in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1996. He went back to Stanford later for an MBA, graduating in 2005 as an Arjay Miller Scholar, a distinction given to the top tenth of the class.
Career
DoubleClick
After a short spell at the consulting firm Andersen Consulting, he joined a small internet advertising company, NetGravity, which was bought by DoubleClick. He rose there to lead strategy and products and helped rebuild the business after the dotcom crash.
Google announced the purchase of DoubleClick in 2007 for 3.1 billion US dollars, and Mohan came with it. As senior vice-president for display and video advertising he built up the systems through which Google sells advertising across the web and on YouTube. Press reports in 2011 said that Google paid him a very large stock grant to stop him from leaving for Twitter.
YouTube
In 2015 he became YouTube’s chief product officer under its then chief executive, Susan Wojcicki. He was responsible for:
- **YouTube TV**, the subscription television service
- **YouTube Music** and **YouTube Premium**
- **Shorts**, the short-video format launched in 2020 to compete with TikTok
- the platform’s trust and safety policies, including its rules on misinformation
When Wojcicki stepped down in February 2023, he succeeded her as chief executive. Under him YouTube has pushed further into living-room television, podcasts, sport and tools based on artificial intelligence for creators. In 2025 Time magazine named him its CEO of the Year.
Other Roles
He has served on the boards of the clothing company Stitch Fix and the genetics company 23andMe.
Personal Life
He is married to Hema Sareen Mohan, who has worked in the non-profit sector, and they have three children. They live in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a keen follower of sport, especially basketball and American football.
He belongs to the group of Indian-origin executives who lead the largest American technology companies, alongside Sundar Pichai of Google and Satya Nadella of Microsoft.
Featured image: Neal Mohan at YouTube Brandcast in May 2026. Photo by Andrew Federman, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
