Neal Mohan

Neal Mohan was born in Lafayette, Indiana, on July 14, 1973. His parents, Aditya Mohan and Deepa Mohan, were Indians from the city of Lucknow. Aditya Mohan moved to the United States in the early 1970s to pursue a PhD in civil engineering. He was admitted to Purdue University. Mohan grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He moved to India in 1985, with his family, spending the next seven years completing high school at St. Francis' College, where he learned to speak Hindi and Sanskrit. At some point between 1991 and 1992, Mohan moved back to the United States. He attended Stanford University, graduating in 1996 with a degree in electrical engineering and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2005 where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar.

Accenture and NetGravity

After graduation, Mohan worked at Accenture, then owned by Arthur Andersen. In 1997, he joined a startup called NetGravity, becoming a key figure in the company's operations and greatly expanding its prominence.

DoubleClick

In 1997, NetGravity was acquired by DoubleClick. Mohan moved from California to the company's headquarters in New York. In the next several years, he gradually became more involved in central business affairs within the company, with DoubleClick relying on him for cutting costs in the wake of the burst of the dot-com bubble. He became the vice president of business operations.

In 2003, he returned to Stanford to pursue his MBA. While he was at Stanford, DoubleClick began to face serious issues stemming from its acquisition from Abacus Direct in 1999. The merger was de facto annulled by Hellman & Friedman, who acquired DoubleClick and split off Abacus Direct from it. Hellman & Friedman requested that longtime executive David Rosenblatt become CEO of DoubleClick in the wake of the company's partition. Rosenblatt accepted this offer and also enlisted Mohan after he acquired his MBA in 2005, under Mohan's conditions that he would stay in California.

Together, Rosenblatt and Mohan devised a plan to orient DoubleClick towards being a company vested upon advertising exchange, core ad technology situations, and an extensive ad network. This plan was outlined in a 400-slide PowerPoint presentation, said by those who created or have seen it to still have influence on current business plans by Google. The plan was presented to the board of DoubleClick and Hellman & Friedman in December 2005, who approved it.