Susan Wojcicki, RIP
Susan Wojcicki, a Silicon Valley visionary who helped shape Google and YouTube, died Friday after a two-year battle with non-small cell lung cancer, according to her husband. She was 56.
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In 1998, Wojcicki rented her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, a pair of Stanford grad students on the cusp of building the search giant Google.
Wojcicki quickly saw the company’s potential and left her job at Intel to become Google’s first marketing manager.
Wojcicki’s tenure at Google saw her spearhead the development of AdSense, which revolutionized the monetization of the internet by allowing online publishers to display ads relevant to content, automatically matched by Google’s algorithms.
But the acquisition of small startup and Google Video competitor, YouTube, for $1.65 billion in 2006 – which she recommended – defined her career.
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Wojcicki became YouTube CEO in 2014 and focused on refining the YouTube Partner Program – which allowed creators to earn revenue from ads.
Susan was one of the most active and vibrant people I have ever met. Her loss is devastating for all of us who know and love her, for the thousands of Googlers she led over the years, and for millions of people all over the world who looked up to her, benefited from her advocacy and leadership, and felt the impact of the incredible things she created at Google, YouTube, and beyond.
She took on one of THE most stressful positions and handled it with grace and vision and was incredibly gracious behind the scenes in ways most people never got to see.
Thanks to @SusanWojcicki, her vision, determination, leadership, and the unique partnership she sparked between YouTube and creators, we have all not only been given a voice and shown the world, but we’ve forged together opportunity, dignity, and legitimacy, set the foundations of the creator economy, and exemplified that true, meaningful, transformational success really is best achieved together.
