Shishir Mehrotra, Founder and former CEO of Coda, built his career on a pattern of reimagining how people work together with technology — first at Microsoft, then at YouTube, and finally through his own company. He holds dual Bachelor of Science degrees in computer science and mathematics from MIT, and began his career as Director of Product Management at Microsoft, working across SQL Server, Windows, and Office.
Mehrotra joined YouTube shortly after Google’s acquisition of the platform in 2008, eventually rising to Vice President of Product, Engineering, and User Experience. Over his six-year tenure, he played a central role in growing YouTube from an emerging community site into one of Google’s largest and fastest-growing businesses, and the platform of choice for a new generation of video creators.
In 2014, Mehrotra co-founded Coda, a productivity platform designed to blend the best parts of documents, spreadsheets, and applications into a single, flexible canvas — allowing anyone to build a “doc” as powerful as a dedicated app. Under his leadership, Coda grew to serve millions of users and tens of thousands of teams, becoming known for treating productivity software less like static paperwork and more like an evolving, intelligent workspace. Mehrotra brought lessons from his time at Google and Microsoft into Coda’s culture, introducing rituals like “Dory” (an open Q&A session) and “Pulse” (anonymous team feedback) to foster transparent collaboration.
Coda was acquired by Grammarly in December 2024, after which Mehrotra went on to become CEO of Grammarly itself, which serves an AI assistant used by more than 40 million people and 50,000 organizations. He also sits on the board of directors at Spotify. Across his career, Mehrotra has consistently pushed the idea that productivity tools should evolve from rigid, static formats into intelligent systems that adapt to how teams actually think and work — a vision now increasingly powered by AI.
