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Paige Leskin, Sarah Jackson, and Lakshmi Varanasi
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- Susan Wojcicki was one of Google's first employees, eventually leadingYouTube for almost a decade.
- She stepped down from the role in 2023. The next year, she died of cancer at the age of 56.
- Here's a look at the life and death of Susan Wojcicki.
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Most landlords only hope their renters pay on time, keep a tidy space, and don't disturb the neighbors.
But Susan Wojcicki's renters — Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin — offered up a bit more: the chance to become employee No. 16 in 1998 at a young search engine startup called Google.
Of course, it took more than this incredible circ*mstance for Wojcicki to rise in the ranks at Google. From expanding the company's ad business to persuading its founders to purchase an up-and-coming video-sharing service called YouTube, Wojcicki played a vital role in Google becoming one of the world's most valuable companies.
She went on to serve as CEO of YouTube for nearly a decade before stepping down in 2023.
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On August 9, 2024, Dennis Troper, her husband, posted on Facebook that Wojcicki had died of cancer: "My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non small cell lung cancer."
Aside from her husband and their four living children, Wojcicki is survived by her mother, journalist and educator Esther Wojcicki; her sisters, Janet, an anthropologist and epidemiologist, and Anne, the cofounder and CEO of 23andMe.
Here's a look at Wojcicki's life and rise at Google, from employee No. 16 to YouTube's chief.
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Susan Wojcicki (pronounced whoa-jit-ski), 56, was a Silicon Valley native.
Source: Forbes
Wojcicki grew up on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, California, where her father, Stanley Wojcicki, was chair of the physics department.
Source: USA Today
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Wojcicki's mother, Esther Wojcicki, has taught journalism for more than two decades at Palo Alto High School, where she has mentored notable students like Steve Jobs' daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, and the actor James Franco.
Source: Business Insider, SF Gate
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Wojcicki was the oldest of three sisters.
Her youngest sister, Anne Wojcicki, is the cofounder and CEO of the genetics company, 23andMe. Anne Wojcicki would go on to marry — and later divorce — Google cofounder Sergey Brin.
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Susan Wojcicki attended Harvard University, where she studied history and literature.
Years later, she said that an introductory computer science course she took her senior year "changed how I think about everything."
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Wojcicki went on to receive a master's degree in economics in 1993 from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
That's also when she met her soon-to-be-husband, Dennis Troper, according to UCSC Magazine. She also went on to receive an MBA from UCLA's Anderson School of Management, according to USA Today.
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Upon completing her MBA in 1998, Wojcicki returned to the Bay Area.
She got married in August to Troper, and the couple settled down in Menlo Park, according to the Palo Alto Weekly. Wojcicki took up a job in marketing at computer chip maker Intel.
Besides Intel, she also had management consultant jobs at Bain & Company and R.B. Webber & Company before joining Google.
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Wojcicki and Troper paid $600,000 to buy a four-bedroom, 2,000-square foot house, at 232 Santa Margarita Ave.
To help pay the mortgage, Wojcicki rented the garage to two Stanford doctoral students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were working on their new search engine company, called Google, according to USA Today.
Wojcicki charged the two $1,700 a month to rent her garage space.
In a 2013 commencement speech at Johns Hopkins University, Wojcicki recalled "late nights together in the garage eating pizza and M&Ms, where [Brin and Page] talked to me about how their technology could change the world."
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One day while working at Intel, Wojcicki was halted in her work because Google was down, and she wasn't able to locate an important piece of information.
That's when she realized how dependent she had become on "the site developed by those two dudes in my garage." She decided she wanted to be a part of it, according to The New York Times.
In 1999, Wojcicki joined the Google team as its 16th employee.
She was named the company's first marketing manager, and was given a "shoestring" budget for heading up Google's marketing efforts, according to the Mercury News.
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Wojcicki was four months pregnant when she joined Google and became the company's first employee to go on maternity leave.
Joining a 15-person startup while pregnant "was a bit of a leap," she told Glamour in a 2014 interview. "But sometimes you have to do the right thing for you right now."
One of Wojcicki's earliest projects was to liven up the Google logo for holidays and special events.
Her first Doodle was an alien landing on Google. Now Google Doodle drawings appear daily on the homepage, according to USA Today.
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In 2003, Wojcicki came up with an idea that drastically increased Google's advertising potential.
She suggested that Google's ad offerings be available not only within search, but also on websites and blogs across the internet, according to USA Today. The product became known as AdSense, and a decade later, allowed Google to bring in almost $240 billion in ad revenue, according to Statista.
Wojcicki took charge of Google's free video-sharing platform, called Google Videos, when it launched in 2005.
The first video she uploaded was "a purple Muppet singing a nonsense song," and her kids' strong reaction to the video helped her to realize the power of user-generated content and its ability to attract visitors.
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Around that time, another free video-sharing website called YouTube was generating buzz and beating out Google's product by making user-uploaded content immediately available to watch.
Wojcicki credits a video on YouTube, showing two boys in China lip-synching to the Backstreet Boys, with convincing her Google should buy the platform.
In 2006, Wojcicki "worked up some spreadsheets" to justify the purchase of YouTube to Google's cofounders, and Google bought YouTube that year for $1.65 billion.
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In October 2010, Wojcicki was promoted from vice president to senior vice president overseeing ad products. At the time, there were only eight SVPs at Google.
By February 2014, Wojcicki replaced Google's ninth employee, Salar Kamangar, as the CEO of YouTube.
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In her first year as YouTube's CEO, Wojcicki went on maternity leave for the birth of her fifth child.
The chief exec wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, arguing that the US should become a leader in maternity leave benefits. "Support for motherhood shouldn't be a matter of luck; it should be a matter of course," she wrote.
Wojcicki revealed in 2016 that she and her husband maintain strict rules for separating work and personal life.
She would unplug for a few hours at night and wouldn't check her email in order to increase her productivity. "If you are working 24/7, you're not going to have any interesting ideas," Wojcicki told The Wall Street Journal.
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Wojcicki would enforce screen time limits for her five children to help them focus on the "present."
She'd even take away their phones, especially on vacation, and restrict how much they used YouTube.
Over the years, Wojcicki has been an outspoken proponent of closing the gender gap in the tech industry.
"Tech is an incredible force that will change our world in ways we can't anticipate," Wojcicki told Forbes in a 2018 interview. "If that force is only 20% to 30% women, that is a problem."
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Wojcicki oversaw the release of major products at YouTube, including YouTube Gaming, YouTube Music, YouTube Premium, and YouTube TV.
Under Wojcicki's leadership, YouTube has grown to more than 2 billion users.
Source: Business Insider
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In February 2023, Wojcicki announced that she was stepping down from her role as YouTube's CEO.
She said she wanted to "start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I'm passionate about."
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On August 9, 2024, Wojcicki's husband announced she had died of cancer at age 56.
"My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non small cell lung cancer," he wrote.
Prominent executives across the tech industry rushed to offer their condolences.
"She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it's hard to imagine the world without her," Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on X. "She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world and I'm one of countless Googlers who is better for knowing her. We will miss her dearly. Our thoughts with her family. RIP Susan."
Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, wrote in a post on X that Wojcicki was "a trailblazer in the industry, an exemplary mother, and a cherished friend."
Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote: "Rest in peace. Especially tragic to see such an early death."
Nick Bastone contributed to an earlier version of this post.
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