Source: Wikimedia Commons
Susan Wojcicki, one of the first Google employees and former CEO of YouTube, passed away on August 9, 2024, aged 56, after battling non-small lung cancer for the last two years. Wojcicki was one of the most influential women in tech and is survived by her husband, Dennis Troper, and four children.
Troper announced Wojcicki’s passing on Friday evening. Current Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai also took to X, formerly Twitter, expressing his grief on the passing.
Susan was born on July 6, 1968, in Santa Clara, California, growing up in the Standford area. Her father was a physics professor at Stanford University, and her mother was a teacher. As for Wojcicki, she studied history and literature at Harvard University, economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and business at the Anderson School of Management.
While her first business was selling “spice ropes” door-to-door at age 11, her entry into the digital realm came when she rented out the garage space in her Menlo Park home to the newly incorporated Google, which briefly used her garage as the company’s first headquarters in 1998.
By 1999, Wojcicki had already worked in the marketing department at the semiconductor giant Intel and as a management consultant at Bain & Company. Google had also moved out of its garage and into a more conventional office space when she decided to join the search giant as its first marketing manager, focusing on finding ways of generating revenue from the company’s search engine. Wojcicki was hired as employee number 16 for Google.
Her first big success came the following year, in 2000, in the form of AdWords, a clickable text-only advertisement that appeared on Google search pages. AdWords ended up being the backbone of the AdSense system, launched in 2003 and still used by search giants to show ads among their search results. Wojcicki worked on everything from AdSense, Google Analytics, Google Books, Images, and more during her tenure at Google.
Several of Wojcicki’s successes at Google also involved acquiring and nurturing start-ups aimed at advertising on the Internet. This especially includes the 2003 acquisition of Applied Semantics, which eventually propelled Google to the forefront of Internet advertising. Other notable acquisitions advocated by Wojcicki include DoubleClick in 2008, AdMob in 2009, and YouTube in 2006. Wojcicki first got involved in online video sharing with the launch of Google Video in 2005.
In 2010, she was promoted to senior vice president at Google and moved to YouTube in 2014, becoming the company’s CEO later that year. Wojcicki would head YouTube for the next nine years, stepping down in 2023 to focus more on “family, health, and personal projects.”
In the News: WazirX reverses post-cyberattack trades; restores user balances
