Google employee who took YouTube to the skies: Who is Susan Wojcicki?

Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, one of the experienced names in Silicon Valley, passed away over the weekend. Following Wojcicki’s untimely death, condolences poured in from major technology companies known as Big Tech.

Wojcicki, who died at the age of 56 after a two-year battle with lung cancer, played a key role in expanding Google’s massive advertising business. When she left to take over YouTube in 2014, Google’s advertising department’s revenues had skyrocketed to over $50 billion.

Wojcicki, the 16th employee in Google’s history, has played a role in changing the way everyone from individual creators to large advertisers makes and spends money online.

Susan Diane Wojcicki (July 5, 1968 – August 9, 2024) was an American business executive who was the chief executive officer of YouTube from 2014 to 2023. Her net worth was estimated at $765 million in 2022.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, called Wojcicki “one of the most important figures in Google’s history.” Last year, Wojcicki resigned from her position as CEO of YouTube, which was acquired by Google, saying that she had “realized her dream of working at a company that had a mission to improve the world” and thanked the company’s co-founders for the “adventure of a lifetime” they provided.

Although Wojcicki studied history and literature at Harvard University, she became interested in the field with her prediction that technology would gain value. She would later say that she “likened coding to writing” and that “we live in an era of a new industrial revolution.” After working as a photojournalist in India for a while, she completed her master’s degree in economics and then business administration at the University of California.

After college, she started working at chipmaker Intel. However, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had rented Wojcicki’s garage while they were developing their famous search engine. Their work caught the young woman’s attention. She joined Google, which was still in the start-up phase, in 1999 while she was pregnant with her first child. Although she later saw the founding duo as “students who were starting their first company,” He would say that he “saw the potential.”

She rose through the ranks at Google, eventually becoming head of advertising and helping build a number of key products, including Google image search and the AdSense ad network, which would later draw criticism from antitrust authorities in the EU and US.

His former Google colleague Wojcicki initially “led the advertising business for the entire industry” because it was still a “nascent” space, tech investor Keval Desai told the Financial Times.

She also competed with TikTok

Unlike some Silicon Valley executives, Wojcicki, who didn’t like to be in the spotlight, was named “the most important Googler who has never been known” by the Mercury News in 2011. In 2013, AdWeek claimed that she might be “the most important person in advertising.”

Another important event was his role in Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006. When she saw the company’s fast-growing video business and the potential for early acquisitions by other companies, she quickly came up with a plan, and Google acquired YouTube “in about an hour,” as she put it.

She had a dynamic vision for YouTube and managed to keep up with the fast-changing pace of online publishing and advertising. After taking over in 2014, she spearheaded the growth of the “creator economy,” and in 2020, she launched YouTube Shorts to respond to the fierce competition from TikTok.

Meeting with YouTubers

“The backbone of YouTube is creators, but Wojcicki is the reason everyone at the company took these creators so seriously. She went to a lot of trouble to meet some of them,” says Priscilla Lau, who worked with YouTube for nearly a decade.

In 2015, she launched YouTube’s ad-free paid subscription service. When she left last year, the company had 2.5 billion monthly active users and annual ad revenues were approaching $30 billion. Meanwhile, the explosion of content on social media and online platforms has brought controversy. Wojcicki was among the tech company executives who had to deal with the difficulty of moderating problematic content.

When YouTube was hit hard by a boycott launched by advertisers in 2017 over its use of offensive and extremist content as well as ads, Wojcicki hired more moderators and began working with other social media CEOs who promised to improve.

But Wojcicki has not faced the same level of scrutiny as Facebook and X founders Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and has not been questioned by US lawmakers like those celebrities. This has raised concerns that the extent of the problem at YouTube has not been adequately investigated.

The daughter of journalist Esther Wojcicki, who has written a book on “Raising Successful People,” Wojcicki will also be remembered as an inspiration to women in tech, advocating for diversity in the workplace and pioneering paid maternity leave in the male-dominated tech sector.

“The fight for parental leave”

Wojcicki, a mother of five, became the first Google employee to take maternity leave. Pichai wrote this weekend that Wojcicki’s fight for parental leave “sets a new standard for the entire business world.”

Despite all her success, Wojcicki wrote in a 2017 article in Fortune that she faced “never-ending” questions about her ability and commitment as a woman and mother.

That same year, she wrote an article for Vanity Fair magazine about allegations of gender discrimination in the technology sector. She expressed her disappointment that “an industry that is so quick to embrace and change the future has not been able to shake off its bad past” and called on tech CEOs to “make gender diversity a personal priority”.

According to former Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg, Wojcicki is one of the most important female leaders in the technology sector and the first woman to head a major company. “My career would not have reached this stage without her unconditional support.”

“She showed women that you can have a successful career and still sit at the dinner table with your family at 6 p.m.,” says her former colleague Lau.

She lost her son

Wojcicki’s battle with cancer was not widely known. However, when she left YouTube last year, she said she planned to “start a new chapter in my life focused on my family, my health and personal projects that I am passionate about.” Shortly after her resignation, her son Marco Troper, a Berkeley student, tragically died of a drug overdose.

Wojcicki is survived by her husband Dennis Troper and four children, as well as her sisters Janet and Anne. Anne, who co-founded the biotechnology company 23andMe, married Google founder Brin in 2015.