"Neal will be a terrific leader for YouTube.”
Neal Mohan will succeed Susan Wojcicki as the new CEO of YouTube.
Wojcicki has served as the platform’s leader for nine years but is stepping down.
Mohan joined Google in 2007 as part of the DoubleClick purchase and eventually rose to the position of senior vice president of Display and Video Advertising.
Wojcicki has spent years working closely with Mohan.
The two of them first worked together building Google’s display advertising business and Mohan has been Wojcicki’s right-hand man at YouTube since 2015.
On Neal Mohan’s appointment, Wojcicki said:
“He has a wonderful sense for our product, our business, our creator and user communities, and our employees.
“Neal will be a terrific leader for YouTube.”
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, said:
“Susan has built an exceptional team and has in Neal a successor who is ready to hit the ground running and lead YouTube through its next decade of success.”
Wojcicki stated that she will now devote her time to “focusing on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about.”
In 2015, Mohan was appointed Chief Product Officer of YouTube.
In addition to assisting with the CEO transition, Wojcicki said that she will serve as an advisor to both Google and Alphabet in the long run.
The former CEO described how she joined Google earlier in her career when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, “a couple of Stanford graduate students,” were developing the search engine.
She said: “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”
She continued reminiscing on her origins at the company and reflected that “it would be one of the best decisions of my life”.
Wojcicki later held a variety of positions, including senior vice president of ads, marketing manager, co-creator of Google Image Search, in charge of the company’s first video and book searches, an early contributor to the creation of AdSense, and participant in the YouTube and DoubleClick acquisitions.
Wojcicki’s resignation also carries significant significance for Google and technology in general.
She has long been one of the incredibly few women running a significant tech company.
She also played a crucial role in the formation of Google. In 1998, she famously rented out her Silicon Valley garage to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and a year later, she became the company’s 16th employee.
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