The early death of Silicon Valley veteran and former YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki this weekend has prompted an outpouring of condolences from Big Tech heavyweights for an advertising visionary who was also known for being a vocal champion of women in business.
Wojcicki, who has died aged 56 after a two-year battle with lung cancer, was instrumental in growing Google’s mammoth advertising business. By the time she had moved from overseeing it in 2014 to running the video streaming platform YouTube it had ballooned to more than $50bn in revenues.
Google’s 16th employee, Wojcicki was a pivotal figure at what has become one of the world’s most influential companies. She helped steer the evolution of how people — from individual creators to big advertisers — make and spend money online.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent Alphabet, described Wojcicki as being “as core to the history of Google as anyone”.
When announcing her resignation as CEO of Google-owned YouTube last year, Wojcicki said she had dreamt of working for a company “with a mission that could change the world for the better”, and thanked its co-founders for “the adventure of a lifetime” during her 25-year tenure.
Wojcicki studied history and literature at Harvard university, but displayed a prescient interest in the value of technology and coding. She later explained that she believed that “coding is like writing — and we live in a time of the new industrial revolution”.
After a stint as a photojournalist in India, she undertook a masters degree in economics at the University of California before embarking on an MBA.
After university, Wojcicki took a job at chipmaker Intel. But Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were renting out her garage as they developed the eponymous search engine, and Wojcicki was intrigued.
While pregnant with her first child in 1999, she gambled and took a job at the start-up. She later said that, although she had viewed the pair as “students who were doing their first company”, she had seen the “potential of what they were building”.
The move marked an inflection point in Wojcicki’s career, and amounted to “one of the best decisions of my life”, she said last year.
At Google, Wojcicki rose up the ranks to eventually lead its advertising business, and helped build a host of core products, including Google image search and the AdSense advertising network that later drew the ire of antitrust authorities in the EU and US.
In the early days, Wojcicki was “shepherding [the ads business] not just for Google but for the entire industry,” given that it was a “nascent” space, Keval Desai, a tech investor who worked alongside Wojcicki at Google for several years, told the FT.
A private person who did not court the limelight in the way of some Silicon Valley executives, Mercury News in 2011 crowned her “the most important Googler you’ve never heard of”. AdWeek mused in 2013 on whether Wojcicki was “the most important person in advertising”.
Her role in Google’s 2006 acquisition of YouTube, which she would go on to lead for almost a decade, was another defining moment. Alive to the company’s fast-growing video business and the potential for other companies to swoop in and buy it, Wojcicki sketched out a case for buying it in “probably . . . an hour”, she said later.
Her vision for the platform was dynamic and evolved at pace with the fast-moving streaming and ad spaces. From when she took over in 2014, she oversaw the growth of the “creator economy”, and in 2020 launched YouTube Shorts in response to growing competition from video platform TikTok.
“Creators are the beating heart of YouTube”, but Wojcicki was “the reason everyone at YouTube cared so deeply about those creators” whom she “went out of her way to meet,” said Priscilla Lau, who worked alongside her at YouTube for almost a decade.
Wojcicki also presided over the growth of YouTube’s advertising business which, like social network Facebook, increasingly stole advertising dollars from linear television. She launched its ad-free paid tier in 2015, and by the time she stepped down last year YouTube had more than 2.5bn monthly active users and nearly $30bn in annual ad revenues.
YouTube cofounder Steve Chen told the FT the “success” that the platform had continued to see “has very directly tied to the incredible, inclusive method in which Susan ran the company”.
“She was incredibly patient and attentive to the opinions of everyone that worked at Google and YouTube,” he added.
With the explosion of content on social media and streaming sites came controversy, however, and Wojcicki was among the tech chiefs forced to grapple with the challenge of how to police problematic content.
YouTube was hit with an advertisers boycott in 2017 after ads began appearing alongside offensive and extreme content, prompting Wojcicki to hire more moderators and join other social media chiefs who were pledging to do better.
But Wojcicki was not subject to the same scrutiny as the Facebook and X founders Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, the bigger public personalities who were hauled up in front of US lawmakers numerous times to be grilled. That led some to worry that the scale of the problem on YouTube itself was not being sufficiently scrutinised.
The daughter of journalist Esther Wojcicki, who wrote a book about “how to raise successful people”, Wojcicki will also be remembered as an inspiration to women in tech, an advocate of the importance of workplace diversity and a pioneer of paid parental leave across the male-dominated tech industry.
The mother of five became Google’s first employee to go on maternity leave, and her advocacy around parental leave “set a new standard for businesses everywhere,” wrote Pichai this weekend.
In spite of her success, Wojcicki wrote in a 2017 Fortune column that she had “time and again” as a woman and mother faced questions about her ability and commitment to her work.
That same year, public allegations of gender discrimination in the tech sector prompted Wojcicki to write in Vanity Fair that she was “frustrated that an industry so quick to embrace and change the future can’t break free of its regrettable past” and demand that tech CEOs “make gender diversity a personal priority”.
Former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg described Wojcicki as “one of the most important women leaders in tech — the first to lead a major company”, adding: “I don’t believe my career would be what it is today without her unwavering support.”
“She showed women that it was possible to excel in a thriving career and still be home by 6pm to have dinner with their families,” said Lau.
Wojcicki’s battle with cancer was not widely known, though she said when stepping down from YouTube last year that she planned to “start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about”. A short time later her son Marco Troper died tragically from an overdose while a student at Berkeley.
The outpouring of condolences and fond recollections of Wojcicki since her death was announced has been striking.
Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton highlighted Wojcicki’s ability to nurture an idea into “something that changes the world” and said she would “miss her brilliance, her kindness, and all she did to open opportunities in tech to people of all backgrounds”.
Desai said she had been “involved in every single important decision that Google ever made.” The company’s “belief that doing good is the primary north star is because of Susan,” he said.
Several people said Wojcicki had been an empathetic leader and a calm negotiator who spoke in plain terms and was able to win and retain the trust of the Google founders.
Wojcicki is survived by her husband, Denis Troper, and her four remaining children, as well as her two sisters, Janet and Anne — the latter co-founded biotech company 23andMe and was married to google founder Brin until 2015.
“She was very down to earth,” Hadi Partovi, chief of educational non-profit Code.org on whose board Susan Wojcicki sat, told the FT.
“It’s sad for the tech industry to have lost one of its greatest.”