Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Dies at 56

Susan Wojcicki, former CEO of YouTube, died Friday at the age of 56 from lung cancer. Wojcicki was the former CEO of YouTube and was the office space of Google’s founders when they launched the search engine startup. Wojcicki later became one of the company’s first employees and helped grow the company into a tech giant.

“I am one of countless Googlers who is better off for knowing her,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of YouTube-owner Google, said in an interview with Google on Friday night. after on X. “She is as important to Google’s history as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine a world without her.”

Wojcicki was born in Santa Clara, California, in 1968 and grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where her father was an experimental particle physicist. In the late 1990s, she and her husband rented the ground floor and garage from their Silicon Valley home to her friends Sergey Brin and Larry Page, while Brin and Page worked to get their startup off the ground. She later signed on as Google’s 16th employee, left her job at Intel, and brought her marketing skills to the fledgling search operation.

“Twenty-five years ago, I decided to join some Stanford graduates who were building a new search engine,” she says. wrote last year. “Their names were Larry and Sergey. I saw the potential of what they were building, which was incredibly exciting, and even though the company had only a few users and no revenue, I decided to join the team. It would be one of the best decisions of my life.”

Wojcicki worked at Google on the company’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006 and its purchase of ad tech company DoubleClick the following year. She was also involved in the development of Google’s AdSense product, which allows third-party websites to earn money by displaying ads served by Google’s advertising network. Online advertising is the primary source of revenue for Google and its parent company, Alphabet.

In 2014, she became CEO of YouTube and under her leadership the site grew into an internet video giant, generating billions of dollars and attracting dozens of viewers. users worldwide. Among other things, she oversaw the introduction of new types of advertising and new subscription services, including YouTube TV and YouTube Music. More recently, she has focused her attention on improving content moderation on the site.

She stepped down as CEO of YouTube in 2023, proverb She wanted to focus on her family, health and personal projects.

Wojcicki, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent female executives, was also known as an advocate of paid parental leave. In a 2014 report opinion piece In The Wall Street Journal, she noted that such leave is rare in America, where it is mandatory in some states, but is not federally mandated. She wrote that she was pregnant with her first child when she joined Google, and that at the time of writing, she was about to have her fifth child and go on maternity leave again.

“I’ve been fortunate to have the support of a company that values ​​motherhood as much as Google does. And I’ve been fortunate to live in a state like California that supports working mothers,” she wrote. “But support for motherhood shouldn’t be a matter of luck; it should be a given.”

Wojcicki is survived by her husband and four of their children. One of her two sisters, Anne, is CEO and co-founder of the genetic testing service 23andMe.