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“If you seek success, start with tenacity,” Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of the $1 trillion company Micron Technology and co-founder of SanDisk, once said. His words are not borrowed wisdom, but drawn from lived experience.Long before Mehrotra was commanding boardrooms in Silicon Valley, he was an 18-year-old from Kanpur standing inside the American Embassy in New Delhi, being told no. Not once. Not twice. Three times. But he didn’t give up, and that perseverance has made him a billionaire and one of the most influential Indian-origin leaders in global technology today.From Kanpur to CaliforniaBorn in Kanpur, India, in 1958, Sanjay Mehrotra has always been someone with big dreams.
After completing his early education in India, he enrolled at BITS Pilani, one of the country’s premier engineering institutes. But he had his sights set far beyond. Mehrotra dreamed of pursuing higher education in the United States.It was the summer of 1976. Mehrotra, then a teenager, stood inside the American Embassy in New Delhi, hoping to kick-start his academic journey in the US. What followed, however, was far from what he expected.
He was told ‘no’ — not once, but three times. Most people would have taken that as a sign. Sanjay Mehrotra is not most people. Or rather, his father wasn’t.They weren’t the kind to give up easily, at least not without a fight. What happened next is the kind of story screenwriters weave when they need a turning point. Mehrotra’s father refused to accept the verdict. He walked straight in to the consul and spent the next few minutes making his case, arguing that his son deserved a chance.
He made a compelling case for his son. The consul was impressed. He said ‘yes’, not knowing he had set in motion one of the most remarkable careers in the history of the global technology industry.All the way to California to build his dreamSanjay Mehrotra was 18 when he arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, to study electrical engineering and computer science. In the mid-1970s, the field was still the province of a relatively small group of true believers who sensed that silicon was about to change everything.
He was one of them. After earning his bachelor’s degree, he went on to complete a master’s. Instead of heading for a comfortable corporate role, he did what the best engineers of his generation did: he went looking for the next frontier.In 1988, that frontier was flash memory. Mehrotra co-founded SanDisk with his colleagues Eli Harari and Jack Yuan. He spent the following years working on his idea of storing data on chips — without moving parts, without fragility — transforming it into something the world would eventually carry in every pocket.
He served as its president and CEO from 2011 until it was sold in 2016, overseeing its growth into an industry-leading Fortune 500 company.
According to Forbes, SanDisk was sold to Western Digital for around $16 billion, a deal he helped engineer as CEO. By that time, SanDisk was everywhere. Mehrotra is a visionary; he knew memory would be at the heart of technology as it evolves. He was certain that memory matters today more than ever before.In 2017, while in his late fifties, he was appointed CEO of Micron Technology. At the time, Micron’s stock traded at around $30 a share. Since then, the stock has surged nearly 3,000 per cent. It has made it to the list of America’s most valuable firms. The explosion of artificial intelligence has created a near-insatiable appetite for memory chips — the high-performance components that allow AI models to process, store and retrieve colossal amounts of data at speed.
As it turns out, Micron makes exactly those chips. Under his leadership, the company has grown significantly, with its stock soaring and its valuation crossing the $1 trillion mark.
English (US) ·