Eight years ago, she sat down with Fortune’s Jennifer Reingold and described the current state of television: Viewership was 40% down from its peak. YouTube was already reaching more 18-34-year-olds than any U.S. TV network.
The future, Wojcicki said, would belong to individual content creators who had the power to amass audiences on YouTube far in excess of those who sat in their living rooms every evening to watch primetime.
And we would consume this future on our phones, not on the big flat-screen your parents bought, she said.
She all-but called the death of TV:
“So TV is probably one of the biggest markets, from ads, from subscriptions, from time spent, and if you look at the next generation—they are completely changing the way they watch TV. They don’t watch the TV as we knew it. They watch … on their mobile phones, in their bedrooms, probably, and it’s completely different.”
Individual creators or influencers would replace studios and networks, she said:
“They are their own media companies. They are the CEO, they are the personality, and then behind them as they get bigger they have production and editors and writers and so we really have this next generation of media companies.”
Google was born in Wojcicki’s garage
It was not the first time Wojcicki demonstrated remarkable prescience. This was the woman who, in 1998, rented her garage (shown above) to two students for $1,700 a month because she needed the money.
“I was worried about covering the mortgage,” she told 60 Minutes “So I was willing to rent my garage to any student.”
“Then two students appeared. One was named Sergey Brin. The other was named Larry Page.”
Page and Brin were, of course, the founders of Google. The company was born in her garage. In 1999, she became its 16th employee, eventually becoming head of Google’s ad business, where she grew its annual revenues from zero to $15 billion by 2013, according to the Financial Times.
Google later bought Wojcicki’s house and the garage to preserve it. And you can explore the way it looked when Larry and Sergey worked there on Google Maps.
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