Unattributed
Neal Mohan is finally leaving Google
Now, that exec - Neal Mohan - is finally leaving to join Dropbox, $4.
Mohan first joined Google in 2008, after the search giant bought online ads company DoubleClick, where he was SVP of strategy and product management.
For years, he worked under Google vet Susan Wojcicki. With Wojcicki leading ads and $4 that had made DoubleClick such an appealing acquisition target, Google's display advertising revenues swelled.
Last year, though, Wojcicki left her ads job $4. Mohan didn't follow her, but continued to keep their relationship close and spent a lot of time working with her.
"So much that many people inside the company thought he had moved over," Swisher writes.
Now, Mohan has moved, just not to YouTube.
He joins Dropbox at an interesting time. The company is $4 as it tries to build its enterprise business in a brutally competitive industry. And he follows not too far behind another Google defector: current COO Dennis Woodside joined Dropbox ~18 months ago after leading Google's Motorola unit (which Google has since sold).
Mohan will be Dropbox's new head of product, coming on board not long after $4. As Dropbox struggles to bolster both its consumer product and enterprise businesses, Mohan's ability to take a long-view on product strategy could be beneficial.
At Google, for example, Mohan made several strategic acquisitions, including Admeld, Teracent, and Invite Media, which helped build Google's robust ad product.
"I would argue startups invented each little pocket of that whole thing, but Neal is the puppetmaster," $4. "He's the guy who got the resources and pulled everything together."
Business Insider reached out to Google and Mohan for comment and will update if we hear back.