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Susan Wojcicki, one of Google’s early employees and former CEO of the company’s video site YouTube, has died at the age of 56.
In a male-dominated industry, Wojcicki has become one of the most influential women in Silicon Valley, helping to create Google’s dominating advertising business.
Her husband, Dennis Troper, announced her death on Facebook. “It is with deep sadness that I announce the passing of Susan Wojcicki,” he said. said“My beloved wife, my wife of 26 years and the mother of our five children, passed away today after spending the last two years battling non-small cell lung cancer.”
He called her “a brilliant mind, a loving mother and a dear friend to many.”
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, said in a post on X that he was “incredibly saddened.”
“She is as central to Google’s history as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine a world without her,” he said. said“She was a wonderful person, leader and friend and made a huge impact on the world.”
In Google’s early days, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin built the search engine while working out of Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, and she became the company’s 16th employee in 1999. During her tenure as head of advertising, Google’s advertising revenue grew from zero to more than $50 billion in 2013.
She became chief executive of the video site in 2014 after being involved in Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2006. By the time she left in February last year, 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 dear friend.” said She served on the Salesforce.com board of directors, including the company’s CEO, Marc Benioff.
During his more than 20 years at Google, Wojcicki served in “a variety of roles,” as he said at the time of his departure, including helping to build Google Image Search and its AdSense advertising network before becoming senior vice president of advertising and commerce.
At YouTube, she has promoted the development of a “creator economy” while dodging controversy over content moderation and video recommendation algorithms.
In an internal memo announcing her departure last year, she wrote: “Twenty-five years ago, I decided to join a group of graduate students at Stanford who were developing a new search engine. I saw great potential in what they were building. It was exciting. Even though the company had only a few users and no revenue, I decided to join the team. It would go on to be one of the best decisions of my life.”
Details of her health are not widely known. Last month, she Planet LabSatellite imagery and data company.
Before joining Google, Wojcicki worked as a management consultant for chipmaker Intel Corp. His mother, Esther Wojcicki, is a journalist, and his father, Stanley Wojcicki, a prominent Stanford University physics professor who died last year.
She has two 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.
Earlier this year, tragedy struck the family with the death of Wojcicki’s 19-year-old son, Marco Troper, a student at the University of California, Berkeley.
