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Susan Wojcicki, one of Google’s first employees and former CEO of the video website YouTube, has died at the age of 56.
In the male-dominated technology industry, Wojcicki became one of Silicon Valley’s most influential women and helped build Google’s all-conquering advertising business.
Her husband, Dennis Troper, announced her death on Facebook. “It is with deep sadness that I share the news of the passing of Susan Wojcicki,” he said. “My beloved wife of 26 years and the mother of our five children, left us today after two years of battling non-small cell lung cancer.”
He called her “a brilliant mind, a loving mother and a dear friend to many.”
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, said in a post on X that he was “incredibly sad.”
“She is central to Google’s story like no one else and it’s hard to imagine the world without her,” he said. “She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world.”
In a memo to Google employees, Pichai said Wojcicki had “used her position to create a better workplace for everyone,” including being the first woman at Google to take maternity leave. “Her commitment to parental leave has set a new standard for companies everywhere,” he wrote.
In Google’s early days, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the search engine while working out of Wojcicki’s garage at her Menlo Park home. She became the company’s 16th employee in 1999. During her tenure as head of the advertising business, Google’s advertising revenue grew from zero to over $50 billion in 2013.
After helping to lead Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2006, she became chief executive of the video site in 2014. When she stepped down in February last year, YouTube had grown to more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and nearly $30 billion in annual advertising revenue.
“Susan was an industry pioneer, an exemplary mother and a valued friend,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, where she served on the board of directors.
During her more than 20 years at Google, Wojcicki wore “many hats,” as she put it when she left. She helped develop Google Image Search and the AdSense advertising network, among other things, before rising to senior vice president of advertising and commerce.
At YouTube, she promoted the development of the creator economy while fending off controversy over the provider’s content moderation and video recommendation algorithm.
In an internal memo announcing her departure last year, she wrote: “Twenty-five years ago, I made the decision to join a couple of Stanford students who were developing a new search engine… I saw the potential of what they were building, which was incredibly exciting, and even though the company had few users and no revenue, I decided to join the team. It would turn out to be one of the best decisions of my life.”
Details about her health were not publicly available. Only last month, she was appointed to the board of Planet Labs, a satellite imagery and data company.
Before joining Google, Wojcicki worked at chipmaker Intel and as a management consultant. Her mother, Esther Wojcicki, is a journalist and her father, Stanley Wojcicki, a renowned physics professor at Stanford, died last year.
She has two sisters: Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of the biotechnology company 23andMe, who was married to Brin until 2015, and Janet Wojcicki, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.
Tragedy struck the family earlier this year when Wojcicki’s 19-year-old son, Marco Troper, died while a student at the University of California, Berkeley.
