Shishir Mehrotra

Co-Founder & CEO of Coda

Shishir Mehrotra, Co-Founder & CEO of Coda

Shishir Mehrotra is the co-founder and CEO of Coda, a company that creates a new type of document that combines words, data, and teams into a single canvas.1 2 Prior to founding Coda, Mehrotra held several leadership roles at Google and Microsoft:

Vice President of Product, Engineering, and User Experience at YouTube at Google, where he helped grow YouTube into the world's largest video destination and one of Google's largest and fastest growing businesses3 4
Director of Product Management at Microsoft, working on projects like SQL Server, Windows (WinFS), Office, and Dynamics4
Founding CEO of Centrata, a software company funded by Vinod Khosla at Kleiner Perkins that aimed to help turn data centers into "utilities"4

Mehrotra holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).1 4 He currently lives in Los Altos, California with his wife and two daughters.4

As CEO of Coda, Mehrotra has focused on creating "documents as powerful as apps" that are accessible to anyone, not just engineers.2 He has written extensively about effective leadership, prioritization, product launches, and creating impact through rituals like Dory (a democratic feedback process) and Pulse (a way to gauge employee sentiment).2 5 6

Mehrotra is also working on a book called "The Rituals of Great Teams" based on interviews with over 1,000 leaders and companies about their team rituals.5 He frequently shares his insights on leadership and product development on his Substack newsletter and Twitter account.5 7

Highlights

Today · TechCrunch

Grammarly acquires productivity startup Coda, brings on new CEO

Yesterday · twitter

Big exciting announcement: I’m excited to share that I’ve signed the agreement for @Grammarly to acquire Coda! And I’m honored to lead the combined companies as CEO.

I share much more details on how this came about in my blog post, but as I chatted with the leaders at Grammarly, I realized that both companies have arrived at remarkably similar views of the future. One where AI will redefine every business application and workflow, reinventing productivity as we know it today into a place where humans and AI work together everywhere you get work done.

Grammarly is an amazing platform — with over 40 million daily active users, I see Grammarly as one of the world’s most ubiquitous AI assistants. We have a broad roadmap of how we’ll bring the products together.

First, we’ll be working on making Grammarly’s ubiquitous AI assistant even “smarter” and “more helpful” by adding the context of Coda Brain. And second, we’ll be working on unifying Coda Docs and the Grammarly Assistant to provide users with a flexible home for users to work. Longer term, we have much grander plans for how we’ll weave together our products to build the AI productivity platform for agents and apps.

I think it will feel like a dramatic acceleration for the Coda product and mission, helping to reach millions of users and help redefine the future of AI-driven productivity.

It’s an important milestone, a big transition for the company. I couldn’t be more excited about it!

Experience

Co-Founder & CEO at Coda (June 2014 - Present)

Vice President of Product, Engineering, UX at Google (YouTube) (May 2011 - May 2014), Director of Product Management at Google (YouTube Monetization) (September 2008 - May 2011), Director of Product Management at Google (GoogleTV) (April 2008 - September 2008), Director of Program Management at Microsoft (January 2002 - April 2008), Founding CEO, Board Member at Centrata (February 2000 - June 2002)