Each Google and YouTube would have existed with out Susan Wojcicki’s contributions. However throughout practically 1 / 4 century as a Googler, she was totally important to each corporations’ success at a number of junctures. That included bringing YouTube into the Google fold within the first place after which taking the video web site to 2.5 billion customers and $29 billion in annual income as its longest-serving CEO. Wojcicki died on Friday at age 56, two years after being identified with lung most cancers and 18 months after stepping down as YouTube’s CEO.
In one of the vital iconic bits of Google lore, Wojcicki, then an Intel supervisor, rented her storage to Google cofounders Larry Web page and Sergey Brin in 1998 because the startup was simply spinning up. She later grew to become its sixteenth worker, at first overseeing advertising and marketing after which serving to to plot AdWords, the system for auctioning off textual content advertisements that turned its search engine right into a phenomenally worthwhile enterprise. Named senior VP of promoting & commerce, she grew the promoting operation to $55 billion in income by 2013.
In 2006, Wojcicki urged Google to amass YouTube, when skeptics thought the video-sharing fledgling was destined to be crushed by lawsuits from the copyright house owners whose content material its customers uploaded with out authorization. The next 12 months, she spearheaded Google’s acquisition of display-advertising large DoubleClick. Each purchases propelled the corporate to have much more overwhelming affect on how digital content material was consumed and monetized. In 2014, she grew to become YouTube’s CEO, as the corporate was nonetheless determining learn how to assist creators construct actual livelihoods on its platform, a course of Nicole Laporte detailed on the time in a Fast Company story.
In 2017, after Wojcicki had made progress on that entrance and YouTube had grown solely extra central to how the world finds and watches video, I profiled her for another Fast Company feature. The undertaking concerned a number of interviews and watching her at work in a number of contexts: on the Los Angeles launch of the then-new YouTube TV service, at YouTube’s annual bash for advertisers in New York, and at an all-hands workers assembly on the firm’s campus. For somebody who had completed a lot on the highest ranges of her business, she got here off as disarmingly regular and missing in ego. On the advertiser occasion, she even apologized to the attendees—YouTube had lately been within the information for pairing model advertisements with movies that included terrorist and white-supremacist messages—in a manner few CEOs might have pulled off.
Wojcicki might have had an unassuming air, however she was additionally indomitable, her colleagues pressured to me. YouTube VP of engineering Scott Silver mentioned she was “as good as she appears, however she doesn’t ever hand over,” whereas Kleiner Perkins enterprise capitalist John Doerr, who first met her at a Google celebration held in her storage, described her as each “aggressive” and “calm.” Sundar Pichai, her boss, instructed me she “has all the time been somebody who might do just about something.” (That features recognizing expertise: In 2004, she helped get him employed as a Google product supervisor, 11 years earlier than he succeeded Web page as the corporate’s CEO.)
As for my conversations with Wojcicki herself, the second I’ll always remember associated to not her profession however to her beaming delight in a sculpture by one in all her 5 children:
After I go to her workplace at Google’s Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California (the place she works someday per week and actually does have a mountain view), even earlier than she’s shared her perspective on creators and markets, Wojcicki doesn’t begin our dialog along with her perspective on creators or entrepreneurs. Relatively, she proudly exhibits me a small sculpture that her 9-year-old daughter made for her. Common from Tinkertoys and cardboard, the inspirational paintings is emblazoned with slogans comparable to “Equity is for everybody,” “Don’t go backward, go ahead,” and, on the prime, “I see the longer term in your eyes.” Excessive expectations comply with her wherever she goes.
One among Wojcicki’s youngsters, a 19-year-old pupil at UC Berkeley, died last February of an accidental drug overdose. Her husband, Dennis Troper, is himself a 20-plus-year Google veteran. Wojcicki got here from a family of overachievers: Her sister Anne Wojcicki is cofounder of genetic testing company 23andMe; and one other sister, Janet Wojcicki, is a pediatrics professor. Their mom, Esther Wojcicki, is an educator; their father, physicist Stanley Wojcicki, died in Could 2023.