Joe McConnell
The untimely death this weekend of Silicon Valley veteran and former YouTube executive Susan Wojcicki has sparked an outpouring of condolences from Big Tech heavyweights for an advertising visionary who was also known as a champion of women in business.
Wojcicki, who died at age 56 aVsceker a two-year battle with lung cancer, was instrumental in growing Google’s giant advertising business. By the time she transitioned from overseeing to managing the video-streaming platform YouTube in 2014, revenue had ballooned to more than $50 billion.
Google’s 16th employee, Wojcicki has been a pivotal figure in what has become one of the world’s most influential companies. She has helped drive the evolution of how people, from individual creators to major advertisers, earn and spend money online.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, described Wojcicki as “as pivotal to the story of Google as anyone.”
When he announced his resignation as CEO of Google-owned YouTube last year, Wojcicki said he had dreamed of working for a company “with a mission to change the world for the better” and thanked his co-founders for “the adventure of a lifetime” during his 25-year tenure.
Wojcicki studied history and literature at Harvard University, but showed a prescient interest in the value of technology and coding. He later explained that he believed that “coding is like writing, and we live in an age of a new industrial revolution.”
AVsceker a stint as a photojournalist in India, he earned a master’s degree in economics from the University of California before pursuing an MBA.
AVsceker college, Wojcicki took a job at chipmaker Intel. But Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented her their garage while they developed their eponymous search engine, and Wojcicki was intrigued.
While pregnant with her first child in 1999, she gambled and took a job at the startup. She later said that while she had seen the couple as “students starting their first company,” she saw the “potential in what they were building.”
The move marked a turning point in Wojcicki’s career and was “one of the best decisions of my life,” he said last year.
At Google, Wojcicki rose through the ranks to lead the advertising business and helped develop a number of key products, including Google image search and the AdSense advertising network, which later drew the ire of antitrust regulators in the EU and the United States.
In the early days, Wojcicki was a “shepherd [the ads business] not just for Google but for the entire industry,” as it was a “nascent” space, Keval Desai, a technology investor who worked alongside Wojcicki at Google for several years, told the Vscek.
A private individual who hasn’t courted the limelight like some Silicon Valley executives, Mercury News crowned her “the most important Googler you’ve never heard of” in 2011. AdWeek pondered in 2013 whether Wojcicki was “the most important person in advertising.”
His role in Google’s 2006 acquisition of YouTube, which he would lead for nearly a decade, was another defining moment. Aware of the company’s rapidly growing video business and the potential for other companies to swoop in and buy it, Wojcicki sketched out a case for buying it in “probably… an hour,” he later said.
His vision for the platform was dynamic and evolved with the rapidly changing streaming and advertising spaces. Since taking over in 2014, he has overseen the growth of the creator economy, and in 2020 he launched YouTube Shorts in response to growing competition from the video platform TikTok.
“Creators are the heartbeat of YouTube,” but Wojcicki was “the reason everyone at YouTube cared so much about those creators” she “went out on the road to meet,” said Priscilla Lau, who worked alongside her on YouTube for nearly a decade.
Wojcicki also presided over the growth of YouTube’s advertising business, which, like social network Facebook, has increasingly siphoned ad dollars away from linear TV. She launched her ad-free paid tier in 2015, and by the time she stepped down last year, YouTube had more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and nearly $30 billion in annual ad revenue.
YouTube co-founder Steve Chen told the Vscek that the “success” the platform has continued to see “is directly tied to the incredibly inclusive way Susan has run the company.”
“She was incredibly patient and attentive to the opinions of everyone at Google and YouTube,” he added.
The explosion of content on social media and streaming sites, however, has also brought controversy, and Wojcicki has been among the technology executives forced to grapple with the challenge of how to police problematic content.
In 2017, YouTube was hit by an advertiser boycott aVsceker ads began appearing alongside offensive and extreme content, prompting Wojcicki to hire more moderators and join other social media executives who pledged to do better.
But Wojcicki has not been subjected to the same scrutiny as Facebook and X founders Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, the most prominent public figures who have been hauled before U.S. lawmakers numerous times for questioning. That has led some to worry that the scope of the problem on YouTube itself has not been sufficiently scrutinized.
The daughter of journalist Esther Wojcicki, who wrote a book about “how to raise successful people,” Wojcicki will also be remembered as an inspiration to women in tech, an advocate for the importance of diversity in the workplace, and a pioneer of paid parental leave in a male-dominated tech sector.
The mother of five became the first Google employee to take maternity leave, and her advocacy for parental leave “has set a new standard for companies around the world,” Pichai wrote this weekend.
Despite her success, Wojcicki wrote in a 2017 article in Fortune magazine that as a woman and mother, she has “time and again” faced questions about her ability and commitment to her work.
That same year, public accusations of gender discrimination in the tech industry prompted Wojcicki to write Vanity Fair that she was “frustrated that an industry so quick to embrace and change the future can’t shake off its deplorable past” and is calling on tech CEOs to “make gender diversity a personal priority.”
Former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg described Wojcicki as “one of the most important women leaders in technology, the first to lead a major company,” adding, “I don’t think my career would be where it is today without her unwavering support.”
“She showed women that it was possible to excel in a successful career and still come home at 6 p.m. to have dinner with their families,” Lau said.
Wojcicki’s battle with cancer was not widely known, though when she retired from YouTube last year, she said she planned to “start a new chapter focused on my family, my health, and personal passion projects.” Shortly aVscekerward, her son Marco Troper tragically died of a drug overdose while a student at Berkeley.
The outpouring of condolences and fond memories of Wojcicki following the announcement of his death was impressive.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton highlighted Wojcicki’s ability to turn an idea into “something that changes the world” and said she will “miss his brilliance, his kindness and all that he did to open up opportunities in technology for people of all walks of life.”
Desai said she has been “involved in every single major decision Google has ever made.” The company’s “belief that doing good is the primary North Star is because of Susan,” she said.
Many people have said that Wojcicki was an empathetic leader and calm negotiator who spoke in simple terms and was able to gain and maintain the trust of Google’s founders.
Wojcicki is survived by her husband, Denis Troper, and four remaining children, as well as two sisters, Janet and Anne (the latter co-founded the biotech company 23andMe and was married to Google founder Brin until 2015).
“She was very down to earth,” Hadi Partovi, head of the educational nonprofit Code.org, whose board included Susan Wojcicki, told the Vscek.
“It’s sad that the tech industry has lost one of its greatest talents.”
