Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, whose storage served as workplace area for Google’s founders as they first developed the search startup, and who later turned one of many firm’s earliest workers and helped make it a tech large, died Friday at 56 of lung most cancers.
“I am one among numerous Googlers who is best for realizing her,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of YouTube-owner Google, mentioned in a Friday night time publish on X. “She is as core to the historical past of Google as anybody, and it is laborious to think about the world with out her.”
Born in 1968 in Santa Clara, California, Wojcicki grew up on Stanford College’s campus, the place her father was an experimental particle physicist. Within the late ’90s, she and her husband rented the bottom flooring and storage of their Silicon Valley home to her buddies Sergey Brin and Larry Web page, as Brin and Web page labored to get their startup off the bottom. She later signed on as Google’s sixteenth worker, leaving her place at Intel and bringing her advertising and marketing abilities to the fledgling search operation.
“Twenty-five years in the past I made the choice to affix a few Stanford graduate college students who have been constructing a brand new search engine,” she wrote final 12 months. “Their names have been Larry and Sergey. I noticed the potential of what they have been constructing, which was extremely thrilling, and though the corporate had only some customers and no income, I made a decision to affix the crew. It might be among the best choices of my life.”
Amongst different actions at Google, Wojcicki labored on the corporate’s acquisition of YouTube, in 2006, and its buy of promoting know-how firm DoubleClick the next 12 months. She was additionally concerned within the improvement of Google’s AdSense product, which lets third-party web sites earn a living by displaying adverts served up by Google’s advert community. Internet marketing is the highest driver of income for Google and its mum or dad firm, Alphabet.
In 2014 she turned CEO of YouTube, and underneath her watch the positioning turned an web video large, producing billions of {dollars} and attracting scores of customers worldwide. Amongst different issues, she oversaw the introduction of latest sorts of promoting and new subscription providers, together with YouTube TV and YouTube Music. Extra lately, she’d turned her consideration to enhancing content material moderation on the positioning.
She stepped down as YouTube’s CEO in 2023, saying she wished to give attention to her household, well being and private initiatives.
Wojcicki, one among Silicon Valley’s most distinguished feminine executives, was also referred to as an advocate for paid parental go away. In a 2014 opinion piece in The Wall Avenue Journal, she famous that such go away is uncommon in America, the place it is required in some states however is not federally mandated. She wrote that when she joined Google, she was pregnant along with her first baby and that, on the time of writing, she was about to have her fifth baby and go on maternity go away as soon as once more.
“I have been fortunate to have the help of an organization that values motherhood as a lot as Google. And I have been fortunate to stay in a state like California that helps working moms,” she wrote. “However help for motherhood should not be a matter of luck; it needs to be a matter after all.”
Wojcicki is survived by her husband and 4 of their youngsters. Considered one of her two sisters, Anne, is CEO and co-founder of genetics-testing service 23andMe.
