Sanjay Mehrotra tried three times to get a visa to study in the United States, and all three times he was turned down.
He was 18, had completed two years of university in India and was carrying admission letters from U.S. universities. Three times he went to the embassy, and three times he walked out with his passport unstamped.
His father refused to give up. He asked for the consul, was told he was having lunch and decided to wait. When the consul returned, he stopped him in the hallway and asked for a few minutes. Mehrotra remembers that they were lucky: the man could simply have kept walking, but instead invited them into his office.
Inside, his father spoke for twenty minutes. He explained what his son would lose if he could not travel and what the United States would lose by turning him away. When he finished, the consul took the passport and issued the visa.
Mehrotra describes it as the best performance he has ever witnessed, and from it he took a rule he has repeated ever since: if you are looking for success, start with persistence. But he adds something that is often left out of stories like this. If the consul had not returned at that moment, or had simply refused to listen, the story would have ended differently. Luck, he says, played a part too.
Today he is 67, has spent more than forty-five years in the semiconductor industry and leads Micron, the only U.S. manufacturer of memory chips, which this year surpassed a trillion dollars in market capitalization.
He grew up in a middle-class family in India, in a house without a television or telephone. The family got its first refrigerator when he was entering his teenage years. His parents raised four children through periods of greater and lesser financial comfort, but one thing was never up for discussion: education came first. All four became engineers.
He describes his father as a force of nature, someone who held on to his values even when it cost him. Two examples stand out. In the 1960s, his father used to say he had four sons, although he actually had two sons and two daughters. He sent one of his daughters to study engineering at a time when there were hardly any women in those classrooms. He was also very strict about refusing to take part in corrupt practices, even when that caused him problems. What Mehrotra remembers about his mother is something different, almost the opposite but complementary: the calm with which she handled difficult moments.
The detour to London
He arrived at Berkeley without knowing a single person and without having arranged a place to live. He completed his degree and master’s there.
In 1979, while looking for work, a professor suggested that he try Intel. He joined the following year and ended up on George Perlegos’s team. There he understood something he had not fully appreciated before: designing a chip was only one part of the job. You also had to think about how to test it, what quality it would have and whether it could actually be manufactured at scale. That lesson stayed with him.
Two years later he moved to Seeq Technology, a company that had emerged from Intel. And in 1984 he came close to leaving to create the company that would later become Atmel. He did not, because of a conversation that ended up having very little to do with technology.
He had married that year, and his wife needed between a year and eighteen months to obtain residency and enter the United States. In the meantime, she remained in India. Floyd Kvamme, chairman of Seeq, invited Mehrotra to lunch to persuade him to stay. Once he understood the problem, he offered another option: send him to Europe, where his wife could join him. Mehrotra accepted immediately, and the two moved to London.
That year as an applications engineering manager changed the way he saw the business. For the first time, he stopped looking at chips only from the design side and began seeing what happened once they reached customers, including the problems that emerged when people actually used them. The conclusion he drew —that technology cannot be developed in a vacuum, without the customer inside the process— is now one of Micron’s stated values.
Then came SanDisk. He co-founded it in 1988 with Eli Harari and Jack Yuan, took it public in 1995 and stayed until Western Digital acquired the company in 2016 for around US$16 billion. The following year he took over at Micron, when the stock was trading at around US$30.
When Mehrotra talks about how he leads, he does not make it sound complicated. He says he thinks like an engineer, relies heavily on data and gets into the details when he believes it is necessary. He also admits that in his early years at SanDisk he tended to get involved in everything, and that he still does when the situation calls for it. In an industry where technology, products and competitors move so quickly, he says, it is not enough to look at the business from the top. You also need to understand what is happening in the details.
He is fairly quiet. And he says that is often deliberate: he listens, lets a moment pass, sorts through what is in front of him and only then makes a decision.
“Use that smile more”
His wife said the line years ago, and he still remembers it.
They married in 1984, in a marriage arranged by their families, and are still together forty-two years later. She worked as an accountant and controller at technology companies, but in the late 1990s she left her career to focus on raising their daughters. Mehrotra acknowledges that without that decision, sustaining his own career would have been much harder.
It started after his first television interview, which aired late at night on the West Coast. When he came home, his wife had already watched it from bed and had just one comment: you have a nice smile, use it more often. Mehrotra never forgot it. He realized that he had been tense during the interview and that tension comes through, and he has thought about it ever since whenever he speaks in public.
She also taught him not to answer immediately. He says that waiting a few seconds before speaking has saved him from more than one response he might later have regretted, especially in difficult moments.
Both of his daughters also became engineers and now work in product management in the technology industry, although neither originally planned to follow that path. One entered university intending to study medicine and the other public policy. For years, they also had little sense of the position their father held in the industry because work was rarely discussed at home.
Mehrotra traveled a great deal and tried to be present however he could. He remembers, for example, helping his older daughter with a linear algebra problem over the phone from a distance.
When asked whether he regrets any of the sacrifices he made, he says no. But he does acknowledge what he lost along the way: time with his wife, his daughters and, above all, his parents.
At the end of one interview, he was asked what someone would miss if they looked only at his résumé. He gave two answers. One was a joke. A colleague who runs another semiconductor company told him that before they met, he had imagined Mehrotra would be tall. Mehrotra laughs: he is not. The other answer was more personal. His résumé does not include his family, his daughters or his two granddaughters —with a third on the way. Nor does it mention that when he plays with the oldest, who is three, she is convinced that her grandfather is three years old too.
