The News
Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, a pivotal figure in Google’s early success, died at 56. Her husband said Wojcicki had been living with lung cancer for two years. She is survived by her four children.
After Wojcicki and her husband rented their garage in 1998 to Sergey Brin and Larry Page who were then working on Google, she joined the company as its 16th employee, devising the idea of allowing other websites to install Google search boxes on their own pages and creating an advertisement-brokering software, which gave the start-up a boost over established competitors.
She pushed Google to buy YouTube in 2006, and became the CEO of the video platform eight years later, growing it into a more than $30 billion company through ads and subscriptions, while contending with several controversial content moderation and regulatory issues.
“Rarely the loudest voice in the room, Wojcicki developed a reputation as perhaps the most important Google employee few people heard of outside of the company’s walls,” The Wall Street Journal wrote.
In a tribute on X, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote that Wojcicki was “as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her.”