Susan Wojcicki, the former boss of YouTube and one of Google’s earliest employees, has died aged 56.Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai announced that Ms Wojcicki had passed away after two years of living with lung cancer. Mr Pichai, who is also the boss of Google’s parent company Alphabet, said on X/Twitter he was “unbelievably saddened” and Ms Wojcicki was “as core to the history of Google as anyone”.
Former Chief Susan Wojcicki dies aged 56
Once described as the “most important Googler you’ve never heard of”, Ms Wojcicki was present at the company’s beginnings when, in 1998, she rented out her Menlo Park garage to the search engine firm’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. She was later persuaded to leave her job at chip giant Intel to join Google, becoming the firm’s 16th employee.
Ms Wojcicki would go on to lead YouTube, the online video sharing company owned by Google, for nine years until 2023 when she stepped down to focus “on my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about”.Ms Wojcicki was one of relatively few women to hold a senior role in the technology industry. She wanted to encourage more girls to go into the field, telling the BBC’s Newshour in 2013 that the future was going to be “increasingly digitally influenced”.
“But then I see there are very few women in the industry,” she said. “Overall the tech industry has, on average, probably about 20% women and I also look at the pipeline of girls coming out of technical degrees and it is very small. “When people couldn’t get him to see reason, she always could,” said former Google director and early Silicon Valley workplace influencer Kim Scott in the book as “a Larry whisperer,” referring to Google co-founder Larry Page.
During Wojcicki’s tenure as YouTube CEO, she oversaw the company’s rapid expansion, helping turn it into the largest video platform in the world. YouTube now has more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and more than 500 hours of content are uploaded to the platform every minute, according to the company.
The announcement of her death led to an outpouring of condolences from a wide range of tech and venture capital leaders on Friday night. “I had the good fortune of meeting Susan 17 years ago when she was the architect of the DoubleClick acquisition,” wrote current YouTube CEO Neal Mohan in a social media post Friday night. “Her legacy lives on in everything she touched at Google and YouTube.”
“She taught me the business and helped me navigate a growing, fairly chaotic organization at the beginning of my career in tech,” said former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg in a social media post. “As one of the most important women leaders in tech — the first to lead a major company— she was committed to expanding opportunities for women throughout Silicon Valley. I don’t believe my career would be what it is today without her unwavering support.”
“I am deeply saddened by the passing of my dear colleague and friend @SusanWojcicki,” wrote Google chief scientist Jeff Dean on social media Friday night. “She has had a profound influence on everyone at Google and impacted the lives of so many.”
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