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Susan Wojcicki, an early Google employee and former CEO of the video website YouTube, has died at the age of 56.
In a male-dominated tech industry, Wojcicki became one of the most influential women in Silicon Valley, helping build Google’s groundbreaking advertising business.
Her husband, Dennis Tropper, announced her death on Facebook: “It is with deep sadness that I announce the passing of Susan Wojcicki.” Said. “My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of five children left us today after a two-year battle with non-small cell lung cancer.”
He called her “a brilliant mind, a loving mother and a cherished friend to many.”
“I’m incredibly saddened by this,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, said in a post on X.
“She is more central to Google’s history than anyone else, and it’s hard to imagine a world without her.” Said. “She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world.”
In the early days of Google, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked out of Wojcicki’s Menlo Park home garage to build a search engine. In 1999, she became the company’s 16th employee. Under her leadership, Google’s advertising revenue grew from zero to more than $50 billion in 2013.
She became the video site’s CEO in 2014 after being involved in Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2006. By the time she stepped down in February last year, YouTube had grown to more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and $30 billion in annual advertising revenue.
“Susan was an industry pioneer, an exemplary mother, and a treasured friend.” Said Marc Benioff is the CEO of Salesforce.com, and she was a member of the company’s board of directors.
Wojcicki has worked at Google for more than 20 years, holding “a number of roles,” as she put it when she left, including helping build Google Image Search and the AdSense advertising network before becoming senior vice president of advertising and commerce.
On YouTube, she has fostered the growth of a “creator economy” while also combating controversies over content moderation and video recommendation algorithms.
In an internal memo announcing her departure last year, she wrote: “Twenty-five years ago, I decided to join a couple of Stanford graduate students who were building a new search engine… I saw the potential of what they were building, and it was incredibly exciting. The company had few users and no revenue, but I decided to join the team. It was one of the best decisions of my life.”
Details about her health are not widely known. She joined the board last month. Planet LabsSatellite imaging and data company.
Before joining Google, Wojcicki worked at chipmaker Intel and as a management consultant. Her mother, Esther Wojcicki, is a journalist, and her father, Stanley Wojcicki, a renowned Stanford physics professor who died last year.
She has two sisters: Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of biotechnology company 23andMe, was married to Brin until 2015; and Janet Wojcicki, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.
Tragedy struck the family earlier this year when Wojcicki’s 19-year-old son, Marco Tropper, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, died.
