Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Dies at 56

The unassuming house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, had been vacant for only a couple of years when I visited in 2008, but the gstructures were still there. This was where Larry Page and Sergey Brin commenceed Google a decade previous. Here was the garage once packed with newly dedwellred servers and routers; there were the carpeted rooms at the back of the house where Page, Brin, and their first includeee Craig Silverstein churned out code; out the triumphdow was the backyard with the hot tub.

In Google’s infancy the house belengthyed to a youthful couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had recently achieved it for $615,000. To help with the mortgage, the Google duo phelp them $1,700 a month to rent unused space. “They go ined thraw the garage,” Wojcicki postponeedr telderly me. “They weren’t permited to go in the front door.”

Wojcicki establish herself hanging out with the youthful establishers and became captivated by the ascfinish of the search commenceup. She soon uniteed it herself, about the time the 15-person company transferd out of her house and into an actual office, over a bicycle shop in Palo Alto. In 2002, she took over the Google advertising arm, eventupartner heading a multibillion dollar business that altered the entire industry. In 2014, she became CEO of the company’s video product YouTube, running one of the world’s hugegest media properties and navigating it thraw competitions with other social netlabors and cascfinishs of satisfied moderation. Though she was one of the most mighty women in all of business, she carry outed it low-key, even to her departure in February 2023, “to commence a new chapter cgo ined on my family, health, and personal projects I’m enthusiastic about,” as she wrote in the company blog.

That same low-key ethic persisted in her difficult final years, where she declareiveially battled non-petite cell lung cancer. On Friday, Troper shelp that Susan Wojcicki died at 56.

In a company understandn for head-scratching quirks, absurd ambitions, and splaafraid profiles, Wojcicki somehow ducked the hugegest spotairys while taking on gargantuan responsibilities. Even before Eric Schmidt became Google’s CEO and became understandn as the mature in the room, Wojcicki was a quiet, methodical presence whose rational direct and stable labor ethic qualified her for the company’s most critical roles, even as Google, postponeedr named Alphabet, grew to one of the world’s most mighty companies. In the earliest days, her educational pedigree–including a degree at Harvard and an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA—as well as her Intel experience, made her a relative veteran appraised to the peach-fuzzers in indict. She was also literpartner a member of the family, after coestablisher Brin wed her sister Ann (they divorced in 2015).

Well before Schmidt’s arrival, Wojcicki was dynamic in steering Google towards profitability. “There was a transition where we genuineized that we could originate a lot more money from the advertising, as contestd to syndicating search on the web,” she telderly me in 2008, in an interwatch for my history of the company.