Neal Mohan & Samir Chaudry: 2026 TAAF Heritage Month Summit

Hey Samir. How you doing, Neal? Nice to be with you.

Hello, everybody.

Yeah, right outside Ann Arbor.

Indeed, yes.

Yeah, yeah, that was definitely a pivotal moment in my childhood. Before I do that, first of all, it's great to be with you, Samir. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real privilege to be here. I was a middle schooler right before high school. I grew up in the Midwest. I was born in Indiana, just maybe similar story to many folks here in the audience. My folks came here, my dad came here to get his PhD at Purdue University. I was born on that campus when my folks were in graduate housing there. Up until that point I had a pretty normal childhood growing up in a small town in Michigan. Lots of friends. I knew that most of my friends really didn't look like me. We grew up in a typical middle-class neighborhood, but other than that we stood out in terms of our heritage, it was a pretty normal childhood. And then one day my parents sprung on me and my two brothers the news that we were all moving back to this place called India, which of course I was very familiar with, but had never really spent any time in. I could understand the language because my parents spoke it with each other, but I couldn't read or write it or speak it. This was in the early mid-80s. So the world we are used to today where you can just fly out there on a Sunday and be back on a Thursday did not exist. So it was a very big culture shock, kind of total fish out of water. I showed up in Lucknow sounding basically like this. So it was a really big adjustment and it was a pivotal moment in my childhood because it showed me something really powerful about what became a core part of my professional career and a big part of my life, which is the power of storytelling. The profession that you're in, that I'm in, came from that pivotal moment in my journey. One of the ways that I connected as this complete outsider was through stories. I very quickly fell in love with — I was a sports kid, so I switched from baseball to cricket. I went from Star Wars and Transformers to Bollywood movies. And through sharing those common experiences with new people, I developed friendships and learned the language and really found my people. That has been a consistent theme of my life since that point. It was a big shock that eventually turned into something that was foundational to the rest of my life and some of my closest friends are from that time in my life during those high school years, and I made them through the power of storytelling.

younger than me.

Yeah, it's it's really interesting, and I don't want to like overly dramatize it, but you know, I felt that way when I was living in Michigan. There was one other family that of Indian background. Their son was my age. He also happened to be named Neil, which was a little strange, but he spelled it the wrong way. I spelled it the right way, but so, yeah, we stood out. And so, we had lots of friends, but it was clear that we were different than a lot of our neighbors and my school friends and all of that. And so, that was a big part of my childhood. That's why that move to India was such a pivotal moment because even though now I moved to a place where a lot of people looked like me, they had a completely different background than I did up to that point. And so, that's why this idea of finding common ground, how do you find those common connections with people who are very different? Coming back to that notion of storytelling and the thread from all of that to where I am today is the power of that. And it happened to me again when I moved from high school in Lucknow, India to college at Stanford. It was all over again. And so, it was another version of developing friendships and fitting into communities again through finding that common ground of storytelling and shared experiences. I am convinced that power of storytelling is a common thread to where I am and the job that I have today.

Yeah, I mean, I think that if anybody who says that there was a straight line is really either making it up to themselves or to you. And for me, it wasn't that way at all. Like I said, in high school, I've always been even from a very early age, I was always a media junkie in the classic sense of the term. I love sports, I love music. I love the news. I remember watching that with my parents or going through the newspaper with them all the way back to elementary school. And so I love that storytelling, movies, media in general, and that's always been my interest. It's a big part of who I am. From Star Wars to G.I. Joe to Transformers to Bollywood to cricket, all of that. I've always loved technology as well. My dad was an engineer. I knew I loved to build things from a very early age. I had this very small startup when I was in high school in India. It was like the geekiest startup in the world. It was software to teach kids chemistry, which is very niche, but it was something that schools were interested in. So, I was always interested in technology and so I knew that's what I wanted to study when I was at Stanford. I also think that time and luck also plays a role in this. I was at Stanford at the dawn of the internet. So, it was really one of those things where my interests and in this case my preparation, I was an electrical engineer studying computer science really collided with this true paradigm shift that was happening not just in the industry but in all of our lives in the world. I remember getting an email address for the first time at school in college at the lineup to get it. It was a very involved process. And I think that became a tailwind in my career because with the dawn of the internet, it was the dawn of a new type of media which is basically digital electronic distribution of news, eventually of video and music. You can connect the dots from that point in the mid-90s of where media was going to be transformed because of this technological invention through my career. One of the first things after I graduated from college was an internet startup that was essentially building the advertising technology for the internet. So, whether it was a newspaper like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, whether it was a media organization that was switching to digital distribution, the fundamental business model was advertising and you needed to build technology on the internet to make it work in a way that was fundamentally different from print or television. That became a big common thread in my career, which is how do you empower the next generation of storytellers and media companies to build a sustainable career for themselves. The most fundamental way that you do that in today's world is through advertising. So, that's how I ended up. I was part of a company that we sold to a big New York City icon back in the day, a company called DoubleClick, which was the pivotal company in Silicon Alley all the way back to the late '90s, early 2000s. So from a very early point in my professional career, I was in the business of empowering storytellers in a way that you could connect to where I'm sitting today, which is what YouTube is all about, but it started in those very early days of the internet, dot com 1.0.

Yeah, I think so. That's for sure. You know, it's funny and you've, my wife, who you've met, she always says I'm even-keeled Neil, and that is, I think most people that work with me would see me that way, and that is I do think that that is a trait that became a big part of my life all the way from childhood through other things that have happened in my life. There are many ups and downs in life, and trying to have this perspective in terms of those types of things. There's nothing that happens on a day-to-day basis at work that can't be addressed in some way if you take a step back in the big picture. That's been a core part of how I conduct myself. It's how I like to think about, I lead the organization, all the people that work for me, and hopefully that reflects back in terms of how they make decisions, how they carry themselves as well.

Yeah, I'm glad you asked. So, Susan, you know, lots of people have heard Susan's story as the place where Google was founded in her garage. She was very early on at Google. She was also the force that was a big driver behind, we sold a company called DoubleClick to Google. That's how I ended up at Google. That was a big part of the growth engine of Google, the advertising business at Google for many years. Susan was the one who pounded the table for that acquisition, also for YouTube, around the same time, by the way, as well. You're right, mentors do play, back to this notion of it's a combination of preparedness but also luck that creates those opportunities. I was fortunate that our paths crossed. I remember meeting her for the very first time when we were looking to sell the business, DoubleClick to Google. It was one of those meetings where it was like a mind meld. We were on the same page. She had a similar passion for this notion of storytellers and media and an interest in it and we just started talking about technology that we could build together that would build the next generation of that on the internet. That's where our relationship started. She was a mentor to me professionally but also in the long run much more importantly we just became very close friends. Our families are super close. I'm still very close with her family. The core thing that I think I picked up from her which we can talk about is just this love of storytellers and creators. Like you said you had a chance to meet her and that was another thing that we really had true common interest on. I like to think that in my role as CEO that's always first and foremost. It's the most critical foundational aspect of the YouTube flywheel and a lot of that came from those early conversations between myself and Susan.

Yeah, it's true. YouTube's been around for 20 years now, 20 plus years. Our mission, if you think about it, has been consistent throughout that time, which is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. What that means in a fundamental sense, and that's why I think it's so important in the context of an organization like TAAF, is that there's no gatekeepers. There's nobody who's telling you that you look or sound the right way, wrong way, you're from the wrong part of the world. If you have a story, you can share it. And then you can connect with fans no matter where they are in the world. If you strip away every aspect of YouTube, it is all about finding your fans, even if they don't know they're your fans yet, no matter where they are in the world. That's what the algorithm on YouTube does. I think it's profound because of what you said, which is that YouTube is this place where there's all these incredible water cooler moments that the world can share together, whether it's the Artemis splashdown or Coachella. This happens to be a Coachella picture by the way. Or individual --

Forget it. Where's your startup?

Yeah. It wouldn't have been on my bingo card as a kid to be honest. I love storytelling, I love technology. I wouldn't have fast forwarded that to being the CEO of a media company, technology company of YouTube's size and scale. But it really is a privilege to be a part of it. I had been at YouTube for a long time before I became CEO. So in many ways there were lots of aspects of what I do today that felt familiar. As the chief product officer I built all the products that you all use every single day so I was in the thick of it from that standpoint. The part that I think was different was a lot of what you touched on: as the leader I am the face of the company. Embracing that for me meant what a lot of those photos showed, which is spending time with the essence of YouTube, which is creators. If you walk the halls of YouTube on any given day, you're going to hear the term YouTuber or creator a hundred times a day because we are a service where 2 billion people all over the world come every single day, but the reason why you all come to YouTube is not because of the underlying technology. It's because of creators, types of content, stories, or live events that you love. One of my favorite things to do in addition to spending time with creators is just asking viewers what's your favorite thing on YouTube and I get a different answer every single time. It tells me something so amazing about human beings. These niche interests that are niche, but because of YouTube there's like 10 million other people who have those interests and you can find those niche communities and groups. In my role, I get to have lots of those conversations, which is a privilege but also super fun.

I think I have to I think I got to meet your mom.

Thank you so much for saying that. It really is a privilege to be with you. It's amazing to see what you do on YouTube every single day. You're paving the road for the next creator who's opening up YouTube for the very first time today. I really do think that the story that I've told is probably reflected in this room many times over in many different ways. I not only feel privileged, but I feel lucky to lead the company. In my view, it is a very quintessential Asian story, but also an American story in the classic sense of opportunity. So, I really do feel privileged to be in this job and I always say to my teams all the time, even though we've come so far at a place like YouTube, we're just getting started.

Thank you. Thank you so much.