Neal Mohan is the newest Indian-origin CEO on the block

“Minutes into his new life, he had to use a big chunk of the $20 he had on him to buy a bus ticket and get himself to campus. But he did it. Because when you want something that bad, nothing – not even a 12-hour bus ride in January – is going to stop you.”

This was how Neal Mohan described his father’s journey to Indiana (US) to pursue a PhD programme in Purdue University in the 1960s, after he had landed at New York’s JFK Airport in the ‘dead of winter’.

The same grit – the anecdote was shared at a talk in 2019 – may have helped Mohan land the top job at Google’s video-sharing platform YouTube after long-time chief executive Susan Wojcicki stepped down on Thursday.