The career rise of Susan Wojcicki, former YouTube CEO, who died of cancer at 56

Susan Wojcicki, who led YouTube as CEO for nearly 10 years, has died of cancer at the age of 56.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Susan Wojcicki was one of Google’s first employees and ended up running YouTube for nearly a decade.
She resigned from her post in 2023. The following year, she died of cancer at the age of 56.
Here’s a look at the life and death of Susan Wojcicki.

Most landlords just hope that their tenants pay on time, keep a tidy space and don’t disturb the neighbors.

But Wojcicki’s tenants, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, offered her a little more: the chance to become employee number 16 in 1998 at a fledgling search engine startup called Google.

Of course, it took more than this incredible circumstance for Wojcicki to rise through the ranks at Google. By expanding the company’s advertising business and persuading its founders to buy a promising video-sharing service called YouTube, Wojcicki played a pivotal role in turning Google into one of the most valuable companies in the world.

She then served as CEO of YouTube for nearly a decade before stepping down in 2023.

On August 9, 2024, Dennis Troper, her husband, posted on Facebook that Wojcicki had died of cancer: “My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non-small cell lung cancer.”

Besides her husband and their four living children, Wojcicki is survived by her mother, journalist and educator Esther Wojcicki; her sisters, Janet, an anthropologist and epidemiologist; and Anne, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe.

Here’s a look at Wojcicki’s life and his rise at Google, from employee number 16 to head of YouTube.

Susan Wojcicki (pronounced whoa-jit-ski), 56, was originally from Silicon Valley.

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Source: Forbes

Wojcicki grew up on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where his father, Stanley Wojcicki, was chairman of the physics department.

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Source: USA Today

Wojcicki’s mother, Esther Wojcicki, has taught journalism for more than two decades at Palo Alto High School, where she has mentored notable students such as Steve Jobs’ daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, and actor James Franco.

Esther Wojcicki.

Joi Ito

Source: Business Insider, SF Gate

Wojcicki was the eldest of three sisters.

From left to right: Anne, Janet and Susan Wojcicki

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Her younger sister, Anne Wojcicki, is the co-founder and CEO of the genetics company 23andMe. Wojcicki later married — and divorced — Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Susan Wojcicki attended Harvard University, where she studied history and literature.

Harvard University.

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Years later, she said that an introductory computer science course she took her senior year “changed the way I thought about everything.”

Wojcicki went on to earn a master’s degree in economics in 1993 from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch

It was also around this time that she met her future husband, Dennis Troper, according to UCSC Magazine. She also earned an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, according to USA Today.

After completing her MBA in 1998, Wojcicki returned to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

She married Troper in August and the couple settled in Menlo Park, according to the Palo Alto Weekly. Wojcicki found a job in marketing at computer chip maker Intel.

Besides Intel, she also held management consulting positions at Bain & Company and RB Webber & Company before joining Google.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Wojcicki and Troper paid $600,000 for a four-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot home at 232 Santa Margarita Ave.

The house that Wojcicki bought.

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To help pay the mortgage, Wojcicki rented the garage to two Stanford doctoral students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were working on their new search engine company, called Google, according to USA Today.

Wojcicki charged the two men $1,700 a month to rent his garage space.

Larry Page, left, and Sergey Brin.

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In a 2013 speech at Johns Hopkins University, Wojcicki recalled “late nights in the garage eating pizza and M&Ms, where (Brin and Page) talked to me about how their technology could change the world.”

One day, while working at Intel, Wojcicki was interrupted in her work because Google was down and she was unable to locate an important piece of information.

REUTERS/Mike Blake

That’s when she realized how dependent she had become on “the site that these two guys were building in my garage.” She decided she wanted to be a part of it, according to the New York Times.

In 1999, Wojcicki joined the Google team as the 16th employee.

Google

She was named the company’s first chief marketing officer and given a “shoestring” budget to lead Google’s marketing efforts, according to the Mercury News.

Wojcicki was four months pregnant when she joined Google and became the company’s first employee to go on maternity leave.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Joining a 15-person startup while pregnant “was a bit of a leap,” she told Glamour in a 2014 interview. “But sometimes you have to do what’s right for you, now and at a given moment.”

One of Wojcicki’s first projects was to animate the Google logo for holidays and special events.

Business Insider

His first Doodle was an alien landing on Google. Now, Google Doodle drawings appear daily on the homepage, According to USA Today.

In 2003, Wojcicki had an idea that dramatically increased Google’s advertising potential.

According to USA Today, she suggested that Google’s advertising offerings be available not only in search, but also on websites and blogs across the Internet. The product became known as AdSense, and a decade later, it has generated nearly $240 billion in advertising revenue for Google, according to Statista.

Wojcicki took charge of Google’s free video-sharing platform, called Google Videos, when it launched in 2005.

Stephen Lam/Reuters

The first video she uploaded was “a purple puppet singing a nonsense song,” and her children’s strong reaction to the video helped her realize the power of user-generated content and its ability to attract visitors.

At the time, another free video-sharing site called YouTube was gaining traction and was outdoing Google’s product by making user-uploaded content immediately available for viewing.

The video that Susan Wojcicki says helped her realize Google should buy YouTube.

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Wojcicki credits a YouTube video showing two boys in China lip-syncing to the Backstreet Boys for convincing Google to buy the platform.

In 2006, Wojcicki “wrote some spreadsheets” to justify buying YouTube to Google’s co-founders, and Google bought YouTube that year for $1.65 billion.

Reuters

In October 2010, Wojcicki was promoted from vice president to senior vice president of advertising products. At the time, Google had only eight senior vice presidents.

In February 2014, Wojcicki replaced Google’s ninth employee, Salar Kamangar, as CEO of YouTube.

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During her first year as YouTube CEO, Wojcicki took maternity leave for the birth of her fifth child.

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The CEO wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the United States should become a leader in maternity leave. “Support for motherhood should not be a matter of chance, but a matter of course,” she wrote.

Wojcicki revealed in 2016 that she and her husband have strict rules about separating work and personal life.

Mateusz Wlodarczyk / Getty

She would log off for a few hours in the evening and not check her emails in order to increase her productivity. “If you work 24/7, you’re not going to have any interesting ideas,” Wojcicki told the Wall Street Journal.

Wojcicki reportedly imposes screen time limits on her five children to help them focus on the “present.”

Susan Wojcicki is CEO of YouTube.

Stephen Lam/Reuters

She even confiscated their phones, especially on vacation, and limited their use of YouTube.

Over the years, Wojcicki has been a vocal advocate for closing the gender gap in the tech industry.

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“Technology is an incredible force that is going to change our world in ways we can’t anticipate,” Wojcicki told Forbes in a 2018 interview. “If that force is only 20 to 30 percent women, that becomes a problem.”

Wojcicki is one of the few women to lead a major corporation. She is considered one of the most powerful women in the world. In 2022, Forbes ranked Wojcicki 23rd on its list of the 100 most powerful women in the world. Forbes estimated her net worth that year at $765 million.

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Source: Forbes, Forbes

Wojcicki oversaw the launch of YouTube’s major products, including YouTube Gaming, YouTube Music, YouTube Premium, and YouTube TV.

Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube.

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Under Wojcicki’s leadership, YouTube has grown to more than 2 billion users.

Source: Business Insider

In February 2023, Wojcicki announced that she was stepping down as CEO of YouTube.

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She said she wanted to “start a new chapter focused on my family, my health and the personal projects that I am passionate about.”

On August 9, 2024, Wojcicki’s husband announced that she had died of cancer at the age of 56.

Susan Wojcicki

Google

“My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non-small cell lung cancer,” he wrote.

Prominent tech executives rushed to offer their condolences.

“She is as central to the Google story as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on X. “She was an incredible person, leader, and friend who had a huge impact on the world, and I am one of countless Google employees who became better people after knowing her. She will be greatly missed. Our thoughts are with her family. RIP Susan.”

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wrote in an article on X that Wojcicki was “an industry pioneer, an exemplary mother and a cherished friend.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote: “Rest in peace. It is particularly tragic to witness such an early death.”

Nick Bastone contributed to an earlier version of this article.

Read the original article on Business Insider