Innovation, Impact and What’s Next: A Fireside Chat with Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra | TiECon 2026

So yes, Manish, it absolutely has been a privilege and delight for me to work with you over these 20 years as well as the amazing team of leaders that I have had the opportunity to work with through my career. Yes, my roots go back to India. I did my high school in India, did college at BITS Pilani for a couple of years and then transferred to UC Berkeley. In 1976, when I got admitted to Berkeley and other universities, going to the US embassy every time, the visa was being denied. It got denied three times. My dad accompanied me every time to the US embassy. The third time, he said he would want to talk to the counselor and find out why I'm being denied this tremendous opportunity to come to the US, particularly to a renowned institution like UC Berkeley. He talked to the counselor out of his passion. I always say at that moment he was my father, he was my lawyer, he was my mentor. He talked to the counselor there for about 20 minutes nonstop, making an impassioned plea for why I should be granted the visa. So keep in mind, the visa that was denied three times, after that 20 minutes, the counselor said, 'Give me your passport,' and he went and stamped the visa. So this became really a lesson for me that if you seek success, start with tenacity. This is what absolutely shaped my journey through my career and remains a real core value of Micron today. If you look at Micron and its history, 47-year history, this company has been an amazingly tenacious company and gone through lots of ups and downs but emerging stronger each time. It really goes back to my lesson that I learned when I was 18 years old in 1976 from my dad: you have to pursue with passion, with determination, and of course with absolute conviction in what you want to do.

Intel was clearly a great place for me to get going with designing memory chips. My boss there who recruited me to Intel, George Perlegos, even back then in that time frame when I started at Intel, it was 1980 after I finished my undergraduate and master's at Berkeley. Even back then, he was teaching me that it's not just about design. It is also about taking design into large volume production, and that requires focus on quality, manufacturability for test, and really just yields and cost effectiveness of the design. So I really was very fortunate to have the best mentor possible at the very beginning of my career. I learned a lot with him in my days at Intel. He left to start a company called SEEQ Technology back then, which eventually got acquired by LSI Logic, and that today is part of Broadcom. So I followed him. Of course, that focus on small companies, the startups, and very many of you here are entrepreneurs yourselves or aspiring entrepreneurs. You know that startup gives you that opportunity to do everything and truly focus on making a difference, not just to survive but to lead. These were some of the things that absolutely attracted me to join my first boss in my career, George Perlegos, at a company called SEEQ. The focus was absolutely about lead with technology and lead the markets with most innovative products, and the rest is history. That was the start of my entrepreneurship career and absolutely encouraged me later to be part of SanDisk as well.

So SanDisk's lead founder was Eli Harari, and I co-founded it with him. SanDisk was started by one Israeli, one Chinese, one Indian. So three co-founders, and that's Silicon Valley. I mean, total world's best coming from all parts of the world. Eli Harari, the lead founder, I consider him as my second mentor for my career, and he helped transform me from an engineer to a business leader. Of course, some of the early decisions that the company faced, one of them I recall clearly was around 1992 time frame when Kodak, which was the photography giant at the time, absolutely wanted to really have SanDisk become exclusive provider of digital film for them. And that was a gut-wrenching decision. At that time they were offering us $3 billion for that exclusivity for a startup that had just gotten off the ground and really in very early days of taking a technology like flash memory which was only in the labs to now starting to design products for commercialization. That was a gut-wrenching decision whether to accept that digital film that SanDisk had innovated and was pioneering becomes an exclusive for Kodak or to make it an open standard. And I really give kudos to Eli Harari, and as part of the team, we decided that we would decline the Kodak offer. Keep in mind that Kodak was a global giant at the time. Decline their offer and focus on making it an open standard. Rest is history. It was then SanDisk digital imaging cards going into cameras, later into mobile phones, and really removable storage everywhere. SanDisk becoming a brand that even today can be found in every corner of the world really started with that decision to make it an open standard and make it a film for everybody. So that was one of the key decisions. Another one I would say was SanDisk started with its own memory technology that it brought into production in foundries, initially partnering with Western Digital and AT&T Bell Labs. Later recognizing that if you want to bring it into volume manufacturing, we need to go to high quality manufacturers like Matsushita at the time in Japan and later with UMC in Taiwan. We recognized that building memory in foundries just does not give you the cost structure that is needed to grow the memory market into a large market. And we decided that one of the reasons that we established a partnership with Toshiba, established a joint venture at the time with Toshiba, was to ensure that we have ownership of that technology and manufacturing and ownership of being able to produce it at cost of silicon. And that was absolutely a transformative decision too, a major decision moving from our own proprietary technology that had served us very well for the first 10 years of the company and switching horses and moving to Toshiba's NAND technology and partnering with them in establishing a joint venture and having SanDisk lead with innovation to take that NAND technology and make it into a global standard that it is. That turned out to be extremely beneficial and shows the importance of partnerships in a startup or in any company small or large. That partnership, that joint venture, even today is the most successful joint venture in the history of semiconductors.

And when I look back at the years here at Micron as well, I mean, no question that transforming Micron into a global leader in technology and focusing on not just having a me-too technology but being the first with most advanced technologies. The same thing we have continued here at Micron because that's what enables that lowest cost capability which is essential to make the markets large.

Manish, you have helped me drive this into the big scale that it has become today. And you mentioned billion dollar, so that reminds me that I had always told Sangeeta, my wife, that when SanDisk becomes a billion dollar company, I would retire. And starting again from a lab into a market and making SanDisk into a billion dollar company, we achieved that in 2003 time frame. And I know that Sangeeta always worried that if I'm going to retire that young, what am I going to do? So here I am, not retired yet.