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Susan Wojcicki was one of Google’s first employees and led YouTube for nearly a decade.
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She stepped down from her role in 2023. The following year, she died of cancer at the age of 56.
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Below is a look at the life and death of Susan Wojcicki.
Most landlords just hope that their tenants will pay on time, keep their space tidy, and not disturb their neighbors.
But Susan Wojcicki’s tenants — Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin — offered something more: the chance to become employee number 16 at a fledgling search engine startup called Google in 1998.
Of course, it took more than this incredible circumstance for Wojcicki to rise to the top at Google. From expanding the company’s advertising business to convincing the founders to buy a nascent video-sharing service called YouTube, Wojcicki played a crucial role in making Google one of the most valuable companies in the world.
She served as CEO of YouTube for nearly a decade before stepping down in 2023.
On August 9, 2024, Dennis Troper, her husband, posted on Facebook that Wojcicki had died of cancer: “My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children, left us today after living for 2 years with non-small cell lung cancer.”
In addition to her husband and their four surviving children, Wojcicki is survived by her mother, journalist and educator Esther Wojcicki; her sisters Janet, an anthropologist and epidemiologist, and Anne, the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe.
Below you can read about Wojcicki’s life and career at Google, from employee number 16 to CEO of YouTube.
Susan Wojcicki (pronounced whoa-jit-ski), 56, is originally from Silicon Valley.
Source: Forbes
Wojcicki grew up on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where her father, Stanley Wojcicki, was chair of the physics department.
Source: USA Today
Wojcicki’s mother, Esther Wojcicki, has taught journalism at Palo Alto High School for more than 20 years, where she has mentored such notable students as Steve Jobs’ daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs and actor James Franco.
Source: Business Insider, SF Gate
Wojcicki was the eldest of three sisters.
Her youngest sister, Anne Wojcicki, is the co-founder and CEO of the genetics company 23andMe. Anne Wojcicki would later marry — and later divorce — Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
Susan Wojcicki studied history and literature at Harvard University.
Years later, she said that an introductory computer science course she took in her senior year “changed the way I think about everything.”
Wojcicki received a master’s degree in economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993.
That’s also when she met her future husband Dennis Troper, according to UCSC Magazine. She also earned an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, according to USA Today.
After completing her MBA in 1998, Wojcicki returned to the Bay Area.
She married Troper in August, and the couple settled in Menlo Park, according to the Palo Alto Weekly. Wojcicki went to work in marketing at computer chip maker Intel.
In addition to Intel, she also held management consulting roles at Bain & Company and RB Webber & Company before joining Google.
Wojcicki and Troper paid $600,000 to purchase a four-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot home at 232 Santa Margarita Ave.
To pay the mortgage, Wojcicki rented the garage to two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were working on their new search engine company, called Google, USA Today reported.
Wojcicki asked the two for $1,700 a month to rent her garage space.
In a 2013 commencement speech at Johns Hopkins University, Wojcicki recalled “late nights together in the garage, eating pizza and M&Ms, where [Brin and Page] told me how their technology could change the world.”
One day, while working at Intel, Wojcicki couldn’t do her job because Google was down. She couldn’t find a key piece of information.
Then she realized how dependent she had become on “the site that those two guys had developed in my garage,” and decided she wanted to be a part of it, The New York Times reported.
In 1999, Wojcicki joined the Google team as the 16th employee.
According to the Mercury News, she was named the company’s first marketing manager and given a “limited” budget to lead Google’s marketing efforts.
Wojcicki was four months pregnant when she joined Google, becoming the company’s first employee to take maternity leave.
Joining a startup with 15 people while pregnant “was quite a leap,” she told Glamour in a 2014 interview. “But sometimes you have to do the right thing for you right now.”
One of Wojcicki’s first projects was spicing up the Google logo for holidays and special events.
Her first Doodle was an alien that landed on Google. Now Google Doodle drawings appear daily on the homepage, according to USA Today.
In 2003, Wojcicki came up with an idea that dramatically expanded Google’s advertising capabilities.
She proposed that Google’s advertising offerings would be available not only within the search engine, but also on websites and blogs across the Internet, according to USA Today. The product became known as AdSense and a decade later, it helped Google rake in nearly $240 billion in advertising revenue, according to Statista.
Wojcicki took charge of Google Videos, Google’s free video platform, when it launched in 2005.
In her first video, she uploaded “a purple Muppet singing a nonsense song.” Her children’s strong reactions to the video helped her realize the power of user-generated content and its ability to drive traffic.
Around that time, YouTube, another free video sharing website, was making waves, even surpassing Google’s product with the ability to directly view user-uploaded content.
Wojcicki credits a video on YouTube, featuring two boys in China lip-syncing to the Backstreet Boys, as convincing her that Google should buy the platform.
In 2006, Wojcicki drew up a series of spreadsheets to justify the purchase of YouTube to Google’s co-founders. Google acquired YouTube that year for $1.65 billion.
In October 2010, Wojcicki was promoted from vice president to senior vice president, overseeing advertising products. At the time, there were only eight SVPs at Google.
In February 2014, Wojcicki replaced Salar Kamangar, Google’s ninth employee, as CEO of YouTube.
During her first year as CEO of YouTube, Wojcicki went on maternity leave for the birth of her fifth child.
The chief exec penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing that the U.S. should become a leader in maternity leave. “Support for motherhood shouldn’t be a matter of luck; it should be a given,” she wrote.
Wojcicki revealed in 2016 that she and her husband have strict rules about separating work and private life.
She would unplug for a few hours at night and not check her email to increase her productivity. “If you’re working 24/7, you’re not going to have interesting ideas,” Wojcicki told The Wall Street Journal.
Wojcicki set a screen time limit for her five children so they could better focus on the “present.”
She even took away their phones, especially on vacation, and limited their use of YouTube.
Wojcicki has been an outspoken advocate for closing the gender gap in tech for years.
“Technology is an incredible force that is going to change our world in ways we cannot foresee,” Wojcicki told Forbes in a 2018 interview. “If that force is only 20% to 30% women, that’s a problem.”
As one of the few female CEOs of a major company, Wojcicki is considered one of the world’s most influential women. In 2022, Forbes ranked Wojcicki #23 on its list of the world’s 100 most powerful women. Forbes estimated her net worth that year at $765 million.
Source: Forbes, Forbes
Wojcicki oversaw the release of key products at YouTube, including YouTube Gaming, YouTube Music, YouTube Premium, and YouTube TV.
Under Wojcicki’s leadership, YouTube’s user base has grown to more than 2 billion.
Source: Business Insider
In February 2023, Wojcicki announced that she was stepping down as CEO of YouTube.
She said she wanted to “start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects that I am passionate about.”
On August 9, 2024, Wojcicki’s husband announced that she had died of cancer at the age of 56.
“My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us today after living with non-small cell lung cancer for two years,” he wrote.
Leading tech executives expressed their condolences en masse.
“She is as important to Google’s history as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on X. “She was an incredible person, leader, and friend who had an enormous impact on the world, and I am one of countless Googlers better off for knowing her. We will miss her tremendously. Our thoughts are with her family. RIP Susan.”
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wrote in a post on X that Wojcicki was “an industry pioneer, an exemplary mother, and a dear friend.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote: “Rest in peace. Especially tragic to see such an early death.”
Nick Bastone contributed to an earlier version of this post.
Read the original article on Business Insider