Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki dies at 56
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Susan Wojcicki, one of Google’s earliest employees and former CEO of video site YouTube, has died at the age of 56.
In a male-dominated tech industry, Wojcicki has become one of the most influential women in Silicon Valley, helping to build Google’s dominant advertising business.
Her husband Dennis Troper announced her death on Facebook. “It is with great sadness that I share the news of the passing of Susan Wojcicki,” he said. speak“My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of five children left us today after a two-year battle with non-small cell lung cancer.”
He called her “a brilliant mind, a loving mother and a dear friend to many.”
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said in a post on X that he was “deeply saddened.”
“She is as central to Google’s history as anyone else, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her,” he said. speak“She was a wonderful person, leader and friend who had a huge impact on the world.”
In a note to Google employees, Pichai speak Wojcicki “used her position to build a better workplace for everyone,” including becoming the first woman at Google to take maternity leave. “Her advocacy for parental leave has set a new standard for businesses everywhere,” he wrote.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a post on X that he was “saddened” to hear of Wojcicki’s death. “She was one of Silicon Valley’s visionaries and will be greatly missed,” he said.
In the early days of Google, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin built the search engine while working out of Wojcicki’s garage at her home in Menlo Park. In 1999, she became the company’s 16th employee. During her tenure overseeing the ad business, Google’s ad revenue grew from zero to more than $50 billion in 2013.
After being involved in Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2006, she became CEO of the video site in 2014. By the time she stepped down last February, YouTube had grown to more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and nearly $30 billion in annual advertising revenue.
“Susan was an industry pioneer, an exemplary mother and a treasured friend,” speak Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, where she serves as a board member.
During her more than 20 years at Google, Wojcicki has worn “many hats,” as she said when she left — including helping create Google Image Search and the AdSense ad network before becoming senior vice president of ads and commerce.
At YouTube, she nurtured the growth of the “creative economy” while addressing controversies over its content moderation and video recommendation algorithms.
In an internal memo she announced start Last year, she wrote: “25 years ago, I decided to join a couple of Stanford grads who were building a new search engine… I saw the potential of what they were building, it was really exciting, and even though the company had only a few users and no revenue, I decided to join the team. It would turn out to be one of the best decisions of my life.”
Details of her health are not widely known. Just last month, she joined the board of directors at Planetary Laboratorya satellite data and imagery company.
Before joining Google, Wojcicki worked at chipmaker Intel and as a management consultant. Her mother, Esther Wojcicki, is a journalist, and her father, Stanley Wojcicki, a renowned Stanford physics professor, died last year.
She has two older sisters: Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of biotech company 23andMe, who was married to Brin until 2015, and Janet Wojcicki, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.
Tragedy struck the family earlier this year when Wojcicki’s 19-year-old son, Marco Troper, died. He was a student at the University of California, Berkeley.
