Indian-origin YouTube head who studied in Lucknow is TIME's 2025 CEO of the Year

The chief executive officer (CEO) of YouTube, Neal Mohan, has been named TIME Magazine’s 2025 CEO of the Year for his “cultural transformation” of the world’s largest video-sharing platform.

“Mohan is a cultural architect, busy redesigning how billions of people around the globe get their information and entertainment. Mohan is the farmer; what he cultivates will be what we eat,” TIME profile of Mohan, an Indian-origin executive who took over as YouTube’s CEO in 2023, states. TIME described YouTube as “the soil” on to which creators are planting “nutritious” or “noxious” content that will eventually form the world’s diet of entertainment and information. Early Life & Background Neal Mohan was born on July 14, 1973, in Lafayette, Indiana, to Tamil parents from Lucknow, India.

The family moved to Lucknow in the mid-1980s, where Mohan grew up, learnt to speak Hindi fluently, was taught Sanskrit, and got inspired by elements that he would later compare to the grammar and structure of computer code.