Susan Wojcicki, the architect of YouTube’s spectacular rise and one of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures, has passed away at age 56 after a two-year battle with cancer.
The news was announced on Saturday by her husband of 26 years and Google colleague, Dennis Troper. He called her impact on their family and the world “immeasurable.”
The California native and dual citizen of Poland worked for Intel as a marketing manager when she made the famously pivotal decision to rent her garage to two fledgling startup founders named Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The duo were attempting to turn their senior project into the behemoth that would become Google – alongside her washer and dryer.
After many late nights sharing pizzas and M&Ms with Brin and Page, the Harvard, University of California, Santa Cruz and UCLA grad became Google’s sixteenth employee and first marketing manager. That daring move, taken back in 1999, locked in her career’s trajectory in a tale so typically Silicon Valley.
“I thought they were crazy but then one day something funny happened at work. I opened up my browser to look something up and it turned out that Google was down. There was an error page and I sat there and I couldn’t get my work done because I realized that no other search service could find the information I had become dependent on Google for,” Wojcicki recalled in a 2014 commencement address [VIDEO] about the moment she realized she wanted to work for Google.
“It turns out that finding information matters – it matters a lot to a lot of people and accessing that information could instantly empower people across the globe,” she explained.
Wojcicki’s tenure at Google saw her spearhead the development of AdSense, which revolutionized the monetization of the internet by allowing online publishers to display ads relevant to content, automatically matched by Google’s algorithms.
But the acquisition of small startup and Google Video competitor, YouTube, for $1.65 billion in 2006 – which she recommended – defined her career.
The video-streaming service wasn’t initially financially successful. Its videos were primarily derided as cat content, it lost money, and it brought about legal battles. Viacom sued, alleging that the service knowingly allowed pirated material and ran afoul of copyright laws.
Wojcicki became YouTube CEO in 2014 and focused on refining the YouTube Partner Program – which allowed creators to earn revenue from ads.
In 2015, YouTube Red – the ad-free video service that would later become YouTube Premium – was launched. In 2020, YouTube Shorts was released in India to fill a gap after the nation banned TikTok. The next year, as other countries considered bans of the Chinese app, Google’s alternative was expanded globally.
YouTube pulled in $31.5 billion in revenue in 2023, amassing 2.7 billion active users and making it one of the world’s most popular apps.
Her time at YouTube was not without controversy – particularly when it came to both data privacy and anti-competitive practices.
Wojcicki’s immersion into the world of video streaming also led her to the fraught world of content moderation. She took the helm as the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent conspiracy theories proliferated, and as the problematic aspects of AI and deepfakes began to emerge.
She stepped down from the role in February of last year while fighting the cancer, citing a shift of her focus to “family, health, and personal projects.” She maintained an advisory role across Google and its parent company Alphabet, as well as board roles at other companies.
But for all that she achieved up until her last days, Wojcicki didn’t consider herself a “career-oriented person,” according toa 2014 interview.
She asserted she was inspired by science and the desire to create – a claim that evokes nostalgia, coming from a tech pioneer. It’s easy to see how: her father was a Stanford particle physics professor and she grew up in housing on the university campus. Her childhood neighbor was notable mathematician George Dantzig. She originally had her heart set on a career in academia, before having her head swiveled by tech.
The tributes have been pouring in online, including from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and, as one would expect, from YouTubers themselves.
“I’ll miss her brilliance, her kindness, and all she did to open opportunities in tech to people of all backgrounds,” wrote former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Some of those causes included addressing gender imbalance in the tech sphere. She told tech startups in a 2017 op-ed to break the boys club cycle and “hire more women” – and even designed Google’s in-house daycare center in its early days.
She was herself the mother of five children, of which she is survived by four. ®