Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, whose garage served as office space for Google’s founders as they first developed the search startup, and who later became one of the company’s earliest employees and helped make it a tech giant, died Friday at 56 of lung cancer.
“I’m one of countless Googlers who is better for knowing her,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of YouTube-owner Google, said in a Friday night post on X. “She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her.”
Born in 1968 in Santa Clara, California, Wojcicki grew up on Stanford University’s campus, where her father was an experimental particle physicist. In the late ’90s, she and her husband rented the ground floor and garage of their Silicon Valley house to her friends Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as Brin and Page worked to get their startup off the ground. She later signed on as Google’s 16th employee, leaving her position at Intel and bringing her marketing skills to the fledgling search operation.
“Twenty-five years ago I made the decision to join a couple of Stanford graduate students who were building a new search engine,” she wrote last year. “Their names were Larry and Sergey. I saw the potential of what they were building, which was incredibly exciting, and although the company had only a few users and no revenue, I decided to join the team. It would be one of the best decisions of my life.”
Among other actions at Google, Wojcicki worked on the company’s acquisition of YouTube, in 2006, and its purchase of advertising technology company DoubleClick the following year. She was also involved in the development of Google’s AdSense product, which lets third-party websites make money by displaying ads served up by Google’s ad network. Online advertising is the top driver of revenue for Google and its parent company, Alphabet.
In 2014 she became CEO of YouTube, and under her watch the site became an internet video giant, generating billions of dollars and attracting scores of users worldwide. Among other things, she oversaw the introduction of new kinds of advertising and new subscription services, including YouTube TV and YouTube Music. More recently, she’d turned her attention to improving content moderation on the site.
She stepped down as YouTube’s CEO in 2023, saying she wanted to focus on her family, health and personal projects.
Wojcicki, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent female executives, was also known as an advocate for paid parental leave. In a 2014 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, she noted that such leave is rare in America, where it’s required in some states but isn’t federally mandated. She wrote that when she joined Google, she was pregnant with her first child and that, at the time of writing, she was about to have her fifth child and go on maternity leave once again.
“I’ve been lucky to have the support of a company that values motherhood as much as Google. And I’ve been lucky to live in a state like California that supports working mothers,” she wrote. “But support for motherhood shouldn’t be a matter of luck; it should be a matter of course.”
Wojcicki is survived by her husband and four of their children. One of her two sisters, Anne, is CEO and co-founder of genetics-testing service 23andMe.