'My father landed in US with $25 in pocket': YouTube CEO Neal Mohan shares childhood memories of India

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan spoke about his childhood and how his parents’ decision to move back to India changed his perspective and acclimatised him to changes. He said that moving from the American Midwest to the bustling Lucknow right before his high-school, not only made him lean into change but also thrive amid such changes. 

Mohan spoke during the peer-led interview ‘View From The Top’ at Stanford Graduate School of Business. The YouTube CEO, born in Indiana, had spent the second part of his childhood in India. 

Neal Mohan said his story starts with his father, a graduate from IIT-Kharagpur, who wanted to pursue his PhD in civil engineering in the US. He was admitted to Purdue University. “He landed at JFK with $25 in his pocket. He asked the first friendly face he saw the quickest way to Lafayette, Indiana. A kind gentleman put him on a Greyhound bus and that was sort of the start of my journey,” said Neal Mohan. 

Born and brought up mostly in the Midwest in Michigan, right outside Ann Arbor, Neal Mohan said he had a “pretty normal childhood”. He said he spent most of his childhood on Transformers, Star Wars and baseball. 

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“I kind of remember very distinctly that there were like two Indian families in our entire town…it was a small town. It happened to be that the other Indian kid, roughly my age, his name was Neal also…so that was a bit confusing for a lot of people,” he quipped. 

But right before high-school, his parents decided to move to India. “And that was, at that time, it felt like a pretty big, dramatic change…we are talking about the mid-80s here so we are not talking about when you can fly to India and back in a few days…that was a big deal,” he said, adding that he could not speak the language, read or write it but understood it a bit as his parents spoke it occasionally. 

“That was a big shock to the system. It was a seminal moment for me because of two things – it just formulated in my mind the concept of leaning into change that’s been like a theme throughout my career and happens to be really important in the tech business, which I am in, of course. It was about embracing all that change ultimately… But it’s really not about surviving, it is about thriving through such seminal and pivotal moments and that happened for the better or worse many many times in my life and career,” he added.

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Neal Mohan said that some of the best friends in his life are friends he had met during highschool in India. “I had to learn 9 years' worth of Hindi and Sanskrit…But that’s a big part of my childhood, coming from this small midwestern town and going to this really big city, Lucknow, and just being able to roll with it and come out of it in a really positive way,” he added. 

Mohan had, earlier too, narrated the story of his father’s journey as well as his during the keynote address at VidCon's 10th Anniversary in 2019. 

Neal Mohan, took over as CEO of YouTube after replacing Susan Wojcicki, who headed the online video-sharing and social media platform for 9 years. Before he was appointed CEO, Neal Mohan was the Chief Product Officer of YouTube. He had also served as the Senior Vice President of Display and Video Ads at Google previously. 

He also serves on the board of directors for 23andMe and StitchFix.

An MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a graduate in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Mohan now serves as a member of the Management Board for the Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

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