Ex-YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Dies at 56

Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, whose storage served as workplace house for Google’s founders as they first developed the search startup, and who later grew to become one of many firm’s earliest workers and helped make IT a tech large, died Friday at 56 of lung most cancers.

“I am considered one of numerous Googlers who is best for understanding her,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of YouTube-owner Google, stated in a Friday evening post on X. “She is as core to the historical past of Google as anybody, and IT‘s laborious to think about the world with out her.”

Born in 1968 in Santa Clara, California, Wojcicki grew up on Stanford College’s campus, the place her father was an experimental particle physicist. Within the late ’90s, she and her husband rented the bottom flooring and garage of their Silicon Valley home to her mates Sergey Brin and Larry Web page, as Brin and Web page labored to get their startup off the bottom. She later signed on as Google’s sixteenth worker, leaving her place at Intel and bringing her advertising abilities to the fledgling search operation.

“Twenty-five years in the past I made the choice to affix a few Stanford graduate college students who had been constructing a brand new search engine,” she wrote final yr. “Their names had been Larry and Sergey. I noticed the potential of what they had been constructing, which was extremely thrilling, and though the corporate had just a few customers and no income, I made a decision to affix the staff. IT can be the most effective choices of my life.”

Amongst different actions at Google, Wojcicki labored on the corporate’s acquisition of YouTube, in 2006, and its buy of promoting Technology firm DoubleClick the next yr. She was additionally concerned within the growth of Google’s AdSense product, which lets third-party web sites earn a living by displaying advertisements served up by Google’s advert community. Internet advertising is the highest driver of income for Google and its dad or mum firm, Alphabet.

In 2014 she grew to become CEO of YouTube, and beneath her watch the location grew to become an web video large, producing billions of {dollars} and attracting scores of users worldwide. Amongst different issues, she oversaw the introduction of recent sorts of promoting and new subscription companies, together with YouTube TV and YouTube Music. Extra just lately, she’d turned her consideration to bettering content material moderation on the location.

She stepped down as YouTube’s CEO in 2023, saying she wished to concentrate on her household, Health and private tasks.

Wojcicki, considered one of Silicon Valley’s most distinguished feminine executives, was also referred to as an advocate for paid parental go away. In a 2014 opinion piece in The Wall Road Journal, she famous that such go away is uncommon in America, the place IT‘s required in some states however isn’t federally mandated. She wrote that when she joined Google, she was pregnant along with her first little one and that, on the time of writing, she was about to have her fifth little one and go on maternity go away as soon as once more.

“I have been fortunate to have the assist of an organization that values motherhood as a lot as Google. And I have been fortunate to dwell in a state like California that helps working moms,” she wrote. “However assist for motherhood should not be a matter of luck; IT ought to be a matter in fact.”

Wojcicki is survived by her husband and 4 of their youngsters. One among her two sisters, Anne, is CEO and co-founder of genetics-testing service 23andMe.