Susan Wojcicki knew she took a leap of faith.
In 1999, while working at Intel, Wojcicki realized that Google, the then upstart search engine, was becoming increasingly essential to her day-to-day life. And that meant the two guys she’d been renting a garage to the year before were onto something.
“I decided I wanted to work for Google, which at the time also was crazy,” she said in her 2014 commencement address at Johns Hopkins University . “With a mortgage to pay and student loans, I'd have to leave a comfortable job at a Fortune 500 company and work for the guys who lived in my garage at a startup with no revenue, a handful of male employees. And also, did I mention I was pregnant? Now, people thought I was the crazy one.”
And though she tells the story with mirth, there’s also an undercurrent of seriousness: It is a genuinely crazy thing to do, becoming the 16th employee at a startup with a weird name. But Wojcicki was a believer—in ideas, in businesses, and in people.
The former YouTube CEO and a vital figure in Google’s development, Wojcicki passed away on Friday at only 56, after a two-year battle with cancer. And, on social media all weekend, grief has been pouring out, clearly visible in the digital landscape she helped create. From Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to the deluge of former and past Googlers, much of Silicon Valley was grieving her loss, an immeasurable one for tech and business as a whole.
Grief may be indomitable, but it’s supposed to be. It’s not meant to be defeated, but survived and eventually accepted into one’s life. But to those of you grieving, I’m sorry—she was clearly an extraordinary leader and person.
Wojcicki even from a distance lived a life that was a reminder of just how much is possible, while still being kind—that how you treat people does matter and is remembered (Pichai remembers her taking him out for ice cream while he was interviewing at Google). I also can’t help but think her career is a reminder of something else—that early startup employees are pretty remarkable.
When pursuing the impossible or the unknown, there’s no substitute for a believer. And as much as Silicon Valley’s devoted to its (sometimes justified) founder myth-making, early employees are also taking a massive leap of faith. These people bet their careers and the trajectory of their lives on an idea and some venture cash.
“Opportunities, the good ones, they're messy and confusing and hard to recognize,” Wojcicki said in that 2014 commencement speech. “They're risky, they challenge you. But things happen so fast because our world is changing so much. You have to make decisions without perfect information. You have to make decisions based on the fact that the world is going to continue to change. Believe that the status quo will be supplanted by something better—that someone's crazy business idea will become real and important. Believe that this technology, however small today, is going to be big in the future.”
An early startup employee has to take a gamble nearly comparable to a founder’s. I truthfully don’t think I’d be brave enough. That takes a special kind of person, with a special kind of faith, in themselves and others.
In Milan Kundera’s 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being , he writes: “We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. What can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”
Considering Wojcicki’s life, I think the answer really is a lot. By every account I’ve heard, she was someone who managed to do the seemingly impossible: Be a decisive, heliocentric leader, who was distinctly warm, kind—and funny.
“Can you imagine if you wanted to search for something and you had to say, ‘I’m gonna AltaVista the answer?’ That would be kind of awkward,” she laughed to the Johns Hopkins audience in 2014. “Or ‘let’s go Excite that!’ You guys should be grateful to Larry and Sergey for the name alone.”
Sure, thanks Larry and Sergey, but my weekend watching the last of the Olympics on YouTube TV—that was made possible by Wojcicki, whose faith in both Google and herself remade our world.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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