Anika Begay
The modest 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 ghosts were still there. It was where Larry Page and Sergey Brin had founded Google a decade earlier. Here was the garage that had once been filled with newly delivered servers and routers; there were the carpeted rooms in the back of the house where Page, Brin, and their first employee, Craig Silverstein, churned out code; outside the window was the backyard with the hot tub.
In the early days of Google, the house belonged to a young couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had recently purchased it for $615,000. To help them with their mortgage, the Google duo paid them $1,700 a month to rent an unused space. “They came in through the garage,” Wojcicki later told me. “They weren’t allowed in the front door.”
Wojcicki found herself hanging out with the young founders and becoming fascinated with the search startup’s rise. She soon joined in, around the time the 15-person company moved from her home to a real office above a bike shop in Palo Alto. In 2002, she took over Google’s advertising division, eventually leading a multibillion-dollar business that transformed the entire industry. In 2014, she became CEO of the company’s video product YouTube, managing one of the world’s largest media properties and navigating competition from other social networks and content moderation crises. Although she was one of the most powerful women in business, she did so quietly, even until her departure in February 2023, “to start a new chapter focused on my family, my health, and personal passion projects,” she wrote on the company blog.
That same low-key ethic persisted in her difficult final years, as she privately battled non-small cell lung cancer. On Friday, Troper said Susan Wojcicki had died at age 56.
At a company known for its head-scratching antics, outlandish ambitions, and flashy profiles, Wojcicki has somehow managed to duck the biggest spotlight while shouldering gigantic responsibilities. Even before Eric Schmidt became Google’s CEO and became known as the adult in the room, Wojcicki was a calm, analytical presence whose sage counsel and steady work ethic qualified her for the company’s most critical roles, even as Google, later renamed Alphabet, grew into one of the world’s most powerful companies. In the early days, her educational pedigree, including a degree from Harvard and an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, as well as her experience at Intel, made her a veteran compared to the thugs in charge. She was also literally a member of the family, after cofounder Brin married her sister Ann (they divorced in 2015).
Well before Schmidt arrived, Wojcicki was active in guiding Google to profitability. “There was a transition where we realized we could make a lot more money from advertising than from syndicated search on the Web,” she told me in 2008, in an interview for my history of the company.
