Susan Wojcicki, former Youtube chief, dies at 56
Susan Wojcicki, who helped turn Google from a startup in her garage into an internet juggernaut, and who became one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent women executives with her leadership of Youtube, died Friday. She was 56.
Her death was confirmed by her husband, Dennis Troper, who wrote on Facebook that she had been living with lung cancer for two years. He did not say where she died.
Wojcicki’s more than two decades with Google began in 1998 in her house in Menlo Park, California, part of which she rented to her friends, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s founders. For $1,700 a month, the two used the garage as their office to build the search engine.
Wojcicki, who had been working at Intel, soon joined Google as one of its earliest employees and was its first marketing manager. Over the years, she reached its executive ranks, becoming Google’s most senior woman employee. She eventually led Youtube, which Google acquired in 2006, and which became one of the world’s largest social media companies.
“She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, said in a statement.
When she became Youtube’s CEO in 2014, Wojcicki was hailed as the most powerful woman in advertising. She had made Google enormously profitable, and she was expected to repeat the trick at Youtube. She led Google’s ad business and played a key role in its acquisition of Doubleclick, an advertising technology company, in 2007.
At Youtube, she introduced new forms of advertising and subscription offerings for music, original content and Youtube TV. During her tenure, Youtube became the internet’s most popular video service, and her role shifted to control of hate speech, inappropriate content, extremism and misinformation.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2019, Wojcicki suggested that her legacy at Youtube would depend on whether it succeeded in content moderation, something the company has struggled with.
“I know we can do better, but we’re going to get there. We’ll get to a point where we have solved a lot of these issues, and I feel like we’ve already made significant progress,” she said. “I own this problem, and I’m going to fix it.”
She stepped down from her role last year, writing to Youtube employees at the time that she had decided to focus on “my family, health, and personal projects.”
But she remained an adviser to Alphabet, Google’s parent company. And she was active as a philanthropist, Pichai wrote in a letter to his staff, supporting, among other causes, research for the disease that took her life. She had built a personal fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions throughout her career.
Susan Diane Wojcicki was born July 5, 1968, in Santa Clara, California. Her father, Stanley, who died last year, was a particle physicist at Stanford University. Her mother, Esther, worked as a journalist and later as a teacher.
Wojcicki was the eldest of three daughters. Her sister, Janet, is a public health researcher and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. Her sister, Anne, was a founder of genetics testing firm 23andme and was once married to Brin.
As a young girl, Wojcicki said in a video in 2015, she was curious, hardworking and ready to try “all kinds of new things and new extracurriculars.” At Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, she worked on the school newspaper, The Oracle, her mother said in an interview with Fortune in 2012.
Wojcicki studied history and literature at Harvard University, where she graduated in 1990. She had initially planned to get a doctorate in economics and become an academic, but her discovery of technology’s potential changed her path, she said in an interview with Fast Company in 2014.