Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, a Silicon Valley native and tech pioneer, has died after a two-year struggle with cancer, her family reported. She was 56.
“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.” wrote her husband, Dennis Troper, in a Facebook post Friday night. “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,” Troper added. “Please keep our family in your thoughts as we navigate this difficult time.”
Wojcicki first became involved with YouTube’s parent company, Google, when she rented out her Menlo Park garage to co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, then Stanford students. They were living in the university’s dorms and needed a space to create a new search engine that would later become Google. Wojcicki soon joined the company as its 16th employee — while pregnant with her first child, CNN reported — and worked at Google for nearly 25 years.
Wojcicki was “core to the history of Google,” wrote current Google CEO Sundar Pichai in an X post Friday night. “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.”
Ron Conway, a prominent Silicon Valley early-stage investor, said Wojcicki was “one of the kindest, thoughtful human beings in addition to being a great Mom,” in a Saturday morning X post. “Let’s strive to follow her example and make the world a better place in her honor.”
An early investor in Google, Conway described Wojcicki as “one of the biggest contributors to the tech community.”
At the start of her tenure with Google, Wojcicki (pronounced “woh-JIT-skee”) led the initial development of products like Google Images and Google Books, according to CNN. She later became the company’s senior vice president of advertising and commerce, leading the company’s signature project AdSense — a initiative that allowed websites to make money by displaying Google ads. Under Wojcicki’s leadership in 2010, AdSense spread more than $6 billion in ad revenue across the over 1 million websites that used its service, and was Google’s second-largest source of revenue.
Years after convincing Google’s board to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, Wojcicki became YouTube’s CEO in 2014. With Wojcicki steering the helm, YouTube’s annual revenue grew to $29.2 billion in 2022, with 2.6 billion people — roughly one-third of the world’s population — visiting the site every year, according to Business of Apps.
Wojcicki stepped down in 2023 in order to “start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about,” the Bay Area News Group previously reported. She married Troper, himself a Google executive, in 1998 and had five children. Their 19-year-old son, Marco Troper, died this February in his UC Berkeley dorm due to an accidental drug overdose.
Wojcicki grew up in Palo Alto, where her father, Stanley, chaired Stanford’s physics department and her mother, Esther, worked as an educator and journalist. Her sisters are Janet, a doctor and professor at UCSF, and Anne, the co-founder of the DNA testing company 23andMe, which is based in Mountain View.
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