Susan Wojcicki, the former longtime CEO of YouTube and a longtime leading Google executive intimately connected to the founding of the company, died Friday following a 2-year battle with cancer. She was 56.
“It is with profound sadness that I share the news of Susan Wojcicki passing. My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non-small cell lung cancer. Susan was not just my best friend and partner in life, but a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to many. Her impact on our family and the world was immeasurable. We are heartbroken, but grateful for the time we had with her. Please keep our family in your thoughts as we navigate this difficult time,” her husband, Dennis Troper wrote in a statement .
The native Californian was born in 1968 in Santa Clara County, the daughter of Esther Wojcicki, a prominent journalist closely connected to tech-related media, and Stanley Wojcicki, a prominent physicist who taught at Stanford.
Raised on the Stanford campus, Wojcicki originally intended to pursue an academic career, but after graduating with a humanities degree from Harvard in 1990, she pivoted to a focus on economics and technology, ultimately receiving her MBA from UCLA in 1998 .
That same year, she rented her Menlo Park garage to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who used it as their original office. She quickly joined the company and among her earliest achievements she helped develop Google image search, which launched in 2001.
By 2003 she was project manager of AdSense and was tapped to oversee Google Video; in this capacity she became aware of then-emerging YouTube, which was outcompeting Google’s service, and recommended that Google purchase the platform, a deal completed in 2006 for 1.6 billion. She has since been celebrated as one of the most important hires Google ever made.
She was appointed CEO of YouTube in 2014, a role she held until 2023, when she stepped down, a decision she attributed at the time to a desire to focus on her family.
In February of 2024, she was struck by tragedy when her son, Marco, a student at UC Berkley, died from an accidental overdose .
“Unbelievably saddened by the loss of my dear friend @SusanWojcicki after two years of living with cancer. She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her. She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world and I’m one of countless Googlers who is better for knowing her. We will miss her dearly. Our thoughts with her family. RIP Susan,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote Friday.
More to come…
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