Tech pioneer and former YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki, who was instrumental in the rise of Google, has died at age 56 after a battle with lung cancer, her husband announced Friday.
Wojcicki, one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley, spent nearly two decades helping transform Google from a search engine startup that started in her garage into a global tech behemoth.
At YouTube, which was acquired by Google in 2006, Wojcicki ran operations for nearly a decade before stepping down last year to focus on family, health and personal projects.
Her husband, Dennis Troper, wrote on Facebook that he had been living with lung cancer for the past two years.
“My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us today,” he wrote.
“Susan was not just my best friend and life partner, but a brilliant mind, a loving mother and a dear friend to many. Her impact on our family and the world was immeasurable.”
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Wojcicki was working at Intel when her friends Sergey Brin and Larry Page opened up shop in the garage of her Menlo Park, California home in 1998. A year later, she joined the company as its 16th employee and first marketing director.
At Google, he played a role in creating image search and worked on the acquisitions of YouTube and the DoubleClick ad platform.
“She’s as core to Google’s story as anyone else, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on social networking platform X.
“She was an incredible person, leader and friend who made a huge impact on the world, and I am one of the countless Googlers better off knowing her. She will be greatly missed.”
Wojcicki was named CEO of YouTube in 2014. She introduced new ad formats and helped grow it by launching a streaming TV service as viewers increasingly turned online for shows and movies.
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He also oversaw the company as it dealt with concerns about children’s privacy, hate speech and the spread of misinformation, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Wojcicki, who was four months pregnant when she joined Google, was a staunch supporter of paid parental leave, arguing in a 2014 opinion essay that it was good for business to offer generous policies.
She and Troper had five children.
Source: AFP