economie

The career rise of Susan Wojcicki, former YouTube CEO, who died from cancer at 56

August 10, 20240
Susan Wojcicki, who led YouTube as CEO for almost 10 years, died from cancer at 56.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

  • Susan Wojcicki was one of Google’s first employees, eventually leading YouTube for almost a decade. 
  • She stepped down from the role in 2023. The next year, she died of cancer at the age of 56. 
  • Here’s a look at the life and death of Susan Wojcicki.

Most landlords only hope their renters pay on time, keep a tidy space, and don’t disturb the neighbors.

But Susan Wojcicki’s renters — Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin — offered up a bit more: the chance to become employee No. 16 in 1998 at a young search engine startup called Google.

Of course, it took more than this incredible circumstance for Wojcicki to rise in the ranks at Google. From expanding the company’s ad business to persuading its founders to purchase an up-and-coming video-sharing service called YouTube, Wojcicki played a vital role in Google becoming one of the world’s most valuable companies.

She went on to serve 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 to our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non small cell lung cancer.”

Aside from her husband and their four living children, Wojcicki is survived by her mother, journalist and educator Esther Wojcicki; her sisters, Janet, an anthropologist and epidemiologist, and Anne, the cofounder and CEO of 23andMe.

Here’s a look at Wojcicki’s life and rise at Google, from employee No. 16 to YouTube’s chief.

Susan Wojcicki (pronounced whoa-jit-ski), 56, was a Silicon Valley native.

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Source: USA Today

Wojcicki’s mother, Esther Wojcicki, has taught journalism for more than two decades at Palo Alto High School, where she has mentored notable students like Steve Jobs’ daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, and the actor James Franco.
From left: Anne, Janet, and Susan Wojcicki

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Her youngest sister, Anne Wojcicki, is the cofounder and CEO of the genetics company, 23andMe. Anne Wojcicki would go on to marry — and later divorce — Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

 

Susan Wojcicki attended Harvard University, where she studied history and literature.

Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch

That’s also when she met her soon-to-be-husband, Dennis Troper, according to UCSC Magazine. She also went on to receive an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, according to USA Today. 

 

Upon completing her MBA in 1998, Wojcicki returned to the Bay Area.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Wojcicki and Troper paid $600,000 to buy a four-bedroom, 2,000-square foot house, at 232 Santa Margarita Ave.
Larry Page, left, and Sergey Brin.

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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] talked to me about how their technology could change the world.” 

One day while working at Intel, Wojcicki was halted in her work because Google was down, and she wasn’t able to locate an important piece of information.

Google

She was named the company’s first marketing manager, and was given a “shoestring” budget for heading up Google’s marketing efforts, according to the Mercury News.

Wojcicki was four months pregnant when she joined Google and became the company’s first employee to go on maternity leave.

Business Insider

Her first Doodle was an alien landing on Google. Now Google Doodle drawings appear daily on the homepage, according to USA Today.

In 2003, Wojcicki came up with an idea that drastically increased Google’s advertising potential.

Stephen Lam/Reuters

The first video she uploaded was “a purple Muppet singing a nonsense song,” and her kids’ strong reaction to the video helped her to realize the power of user-generated content and its ability to attract visitors.

Around that time, another free video-sharing website called YouTube was generating buzz and beating out Google’s product by making user-uploaded content immediately available to watch.

Reuters

In October 2010, Wojcicki was promoted from vice president to senior vice president overseeing ad products. At the time, there were only eight SVPs at Google.

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In her first year as YouTube’s CEO, Wojcicki went on maternity leave for the birth of her fifth child.

Mateusz Wlodarczyk / Getty

She would unplug for a few hours at night and wouldn’t check her email in order to increase her productivity. “If you are working 24/7, you’re not going to have any interesting ideas,” Wojcicki told The Wall Street Journal.

Wojcicki would enforce screen time limits for her five children to help them focus on the “present.”

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“Tech is an incredible force that will change our world in ways we can’t anticipate,” Wojcicki told Forbes in a 2018 interview. “If that force is only 20% to 30% women, that is a problem.” 

As one of few females CEOs of a major company, Wojcicki is considered one of the world’s most influential women. In 2022, Forbes listed Wojcicki at number 23 on its list of the world’s 100 most powerful women. Forbes estimated her net worth that year to be $765 million.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.

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Under Wojcicki’s leadership, YouTube has grown to more than 2 billion users.

Source: Business Insider

In February 2023, Wojcicki announced that she was stepping down from her role as YouTube’s CEO.
Susan Wojcicki

Google

“My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non small cell lung cancer,” he wrote. 

Prominent executives across the tech industry rushed to offer their condolences. 

“She is as core to the history of Google 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 a tremendous impact on the world and I’m one of countless Googlers who is better for knowing her. We will miss her dearly. Our thoughts with her family. RIP Susan.”

Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, wrote in a post on X that Wojcicki was “a trailblazer in the industry, an exemplary mother, and a cherished 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

https://www.businessinsider.com/susan-wojcicki-youtube-ceo-bio-career-life-2018-12