Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Dies at 56

The unassuming home on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, had been empty for under a few years once I visited in 2008, however the ghosts have been nonetheless there. This was the place Larry Web page and Sergey Brin began Google a decade earlier. Right here was the storage as soon as filled with newly delivered servers and routers; there have been the carpeted rooms behind the home the place Web page, Brin, and their first worker, Craig Silverstein, churned out code; out the window was the yard with the recent tub.

In Google’s infancy the home belonged to a younger couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had just lately bought it for $615,000. To assist with the mortgage, the Google duo paid them $1,700 a month to lease unused area. “They entered via the storage,” Wojcicki later informed me. “They weren’t allowed to enter the entrance door.”

Wojcicki discovered herself hanging out with the younger founders and have become fascinated by the rise of the search startup. She quickly joined it herself, concerning the time the 15-person firm moved out of her home and into an precise workplace, over a bicycle store in Palo Alto. In 2002, she took over the Google promoting arm, ultimately heading a multibillion-dollar enterprise that reworked your complete trade. In 2014, she turned CEO of the corporate’s video product YouTube, working one of many world’s greatest media properties and navigating it via competitions with different social networks and crises of content material moderation. Although she was one of the highly effective ladies in all of enterprise, she performed it low-key, even to her departure in February 2023, “to start out a brand new chapter centered on my household, well being, and private tasks I’m keen about,” as she wrote within the firm weblog.

That very same low-key ethic endured in her troublesome remaining years, the place she privately battled non-small cell lung most cancers. On Friday, Troper stated that Susan Wojcicki died at 56.

In an organization identified for head-scratching quirks, absurd ambitions, and splashy profiles, Wojcicki by some means ducked the most important spotlights whereas taking over gargantuan tasks. Even earlier than Eric Schmidt turned Google’s CEO and have become generally known as the grownup within the room, Wojcicki was a peaceful, analytical presence whose sensible counsel and regular work ethic certified her for the corporate’s most important roles, at the same time as Google, later named Alphabet, grew to one of many world’s strongest firms. Within the earliest days, her academic pedigree—together with a level at Harvard and an MBA from the Anderson Faculty of Administration at UCLA—in addition to her Intel expertise made her a relative veteran in comparison with the peach-fuzzers in cost. She was additionally actually a member of the household, after cofounder Brin married her sister Ann (they divorced in 2015).

Properly earlier than Schmidt’s arrival, Wojcicki was lively in steering Google towards profitability. “There was a transition the place we realized that we may make much more cash from the promoting, versus syndicating search on the net,” she informed me in 2008, in an interview for my historical past of the corporate.