Susan Wojcicki, who served as YouTube’s CEO for almost a decade until she stepped down last year, has died. She was 56 years old. Her husband Dennis Troper has shared the news on Facebook, revealing that Wojcicki lived two years with non-small cell lung cancer. “Susan was not just my best friend and partner in life, but a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to many,” he wrote in his post. “Her impact on our family and the world was immeasurable.”
Google operated out of Wojcicki’s garage when the company was just starting out, with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin using it as their office. She became the company’s first marketing manager, co-created Google Image Search and was the first product manager of AdSense. Wojcicki also headed Google’s video efforts and was the one who encouraged the company to purchase YouTube in 2006, a year after the video-sharing platform debuted.
In 2014, she was appointed as the CEO of YouTube, which became a key part of Google under her leadership. For the fiscal year of 2022, the year before she stepped down, YouTube ads brought in $29.24 billion in revenue, which made up over 10 percent of the company’s total earnings. Outside of her work with Google, Wojcicki brought attention to the gender gap issue in tech and to the plight of refugees. She was also a proponent of lengthy parental leaves and talked about they’re actually good for business. In a post on X, Alphabet’s current CEO, Sundar Pichai, said Wojcicki was “as core to the history of Google as anyone” and described her someone who’s “had a tremendous impact on the world.”
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