Joe McConnell
Susan Wojcicki, former YouTube executive and one of Google’s first employees, has died at age 56.
Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai announced that Ms. Wojcicki died after two years of living with lung cancer.
Mr. Pichai, who is also the head of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said on X/Twitter that he was “incredibly saddened” and that Ms. Wojcicki was “as central to Google’s story as anyone.”
Once described as “the most important Googler you’ve never heard of,” Ms. Wojcicki was present at the company’s early days when, in 1998, she rented his Menlo Park garage to the founders of the search engine company, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
She was later persuaded to leave her job at chip giant Intel to join Google, becoming the company’s 16th employee.
Ms. Wojcicki would go on to lead YouTube, the Google-owned online video-sharing company, for nine years until 2023, when she stepped down to focus “on my family, my health and personal projects that I am passionate about.”
Ms. Wojcicki was one of the few women to hold a senior role in the technology industry.
She wanted to encourage more girls to enter this field, telling the BBC Newshour in 2013 that the future would be “increasingly influenced by digital.”
“But then I see that there are very few women in the industry,” she said. “Tech in general is, on average, about 20 percent women, and I also look at the pipeline of girls coming out of technical degrees and it’s very small.”
While Ms. Wojcicki has risen to the helm of YouTube, her tenure has not been without controversy. The platform has faced criticism for its handling of misinformation online, including during the Covid pandemic.
In 2022, several fact-checking organizations wrote to her accusing YouTube of being “one of the leading channels of disinformation and misinformation online around the world.”
A year later, Ms. Wojcicki stepped down to focus on her personal life and health.
Announcing her death “with deep sadness,” her husband Dennis Troper said: “My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us today after two years of living with non-small cell lung cancer.”
