Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Passes Away at 56

This simple house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, was just a few years vacant when I visited in 2008, but the spirits of the past still lingered. It was here that Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google a decade earlier. The garage was once packed with newly delivered servers and routers; the carpeted rooms at the back were where Page, Brin, and their first employee Craig Silverstein wrote code; and outside the window was a backyard with a hot tub.

In Google’s early days, this house belonged to a young couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had recently purchased it for $615,000. To help with the mortgage, the Google duo paid them $1,700 a month to rent the unused space. “They entered through the garage,” Wojcicki later told me. “They weren’t allowed to use the front door.”

Wojcicki became increasingly intrigued by the young founders, often finding herself captivated by the rapid growth of the search startup. She soon joined them, just as the 15-person company moved from their home to a real office in a bike shop in Palo Alto. In 2002, she took charge of Google’s advertising branch, eventually leading a multi-billion-dollar business that transformed the industry. In 2014, she became the CEO of the company’s video product, YouTube, steering one of the world’s largest media assets through competition and content moderation crises. Despite being one of the most powerful women in the business, she kept a low profile until her departure in February 2023, to “start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about,” as she wrote on the company blog.

Wojcicki’s quiet resilience persisted through her tough final years, as she privately battled non-small cell lung cancer. On Friday, Troper announced that Susan Wojcicki had passed away at the age of 56.

In a company known for its quirky oddities, absurd ambitions, and charismatic profiles, Wojcicki managed to take on immense responsibilities while staying out of the spotlight. Long before Eric Schmidt took the helm as Google’s CEO and was regarded as the guiding force, Wojcicki was the steady, analytical figure whose sound judgment and unwavering work ethic made her an essential leader in the company. As Google, later rebranded as Alphabet, expanded into a global powerhouse, her influence was pivotal in shaping its success. In the early days, her educational pedigree—including a degree from Harvard and an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management—along with her Intel experience, made her a relative veteran compared to the people in charge. She was literally part of the family, too, when co-founder Brin married her sister Anne (they divorced in 2015).

Before Schmidt’s arrival, Wojcicki played a key role in leading Google towards profitability. “There was a shift when we realized we could make much more money from advertising than syndicating search on the web,” she told me in a 2008 interview for the company’s history.

Wojcicki was deeply involved in Google’s pivot in the advertising business, moving away from a per-impression payment model to one where advertisers only paid when consumers clicked on their ads. This advertising model was revolutionary, transforming the industry based on measurable results rather than vague attempts to gauge the effectiveness of ads. She could talk endlessly about the “physics of clicks.” Wojcicki also played a pivotal role in launching AdSense, another groundbreaking product that allowed Google to serve ads on third-party websites across the internet. Other products she oversaw included Google Analytics, Google Books, and even the doodles that decorate the search page.

When another early Googler, Salar Kamangar, left the top role at YouTube in 2014, the platform already had a billion users and was one of the world’s leading media assets. It could have been expected that CEO Larry Page would hire an industry veteran to take it to the next level. Instead, he trusted that Wojcicki could do the job.

“When I started on YouTube, it felt like stepping into a time machine—like I was back in the early days of Google in 2002,” she shared with Peter Rubin during the WIRED25 conference in 2018. “It was really an opportunity for me to take all those lessons I learned at Google and…apply them to YouTube.” During her tenure, she added over a billion users, generated over $32 billion in annual revenue, and established leadership in short-form video despite the rise of competitors like TikTok. When she retired in 2023, she was still grappling with the challenges of moderating content on a massive social media platform.

Wojcicki was also known for her mentorship and coaching. Among the countless people she helped was Sheryl Sandberg, whose Google experience became the launchpad for her role as COO at Meta. Sandberg posted, “She taught me the business and helped me navigate a growing, quite disorganized organization early in my tech career.” When Wojcicki joined Google, she was four months pregnant and understood how fortunate she was that her employer gave her time off after her child was born. As a mother of five, she became a champion of parental leave, not only in her company but for women everywhere.

What I remember most about her was her groundedness. Although she was incredibly wealthy, she remained unpretentious. (Though I recall one conversation where she and Wendi Murdoch discussed the correct number of nannies to bring on a Mediterranean vacation.) She fit right in on the Met Gala red carpet, but she never seemed to chase glamour. Family was her clear priority. Whenever I interviewed her, she was straightforward yet shrewdly cautious, a true company loyalist who bled primary colors.

Wojcicki leaves behind her husband, a Google employee, and their four children. Her son Marco passed away from an overdose last February. Her surviving sisters include Anne, co-founder of 23andMe; Janet, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco; and her mother Esther, a renowned educator who wrote a book about raising remarkable daughters. Her father Stanley, a particle physicist who taught at Stanford, passed away last year.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who was mentored by Wojcicki, wrote, “Her loss is devastating for all of us who knew and loved her, the thousands of Googlers she led over the years, and the millions around the world who drew inspiration from her, benefited from her advocacy and leadership, and felt the impact of the incredible things she built at Google, YouTube, and beyond.”

Although Wojcicki’s career at Google/Alphabet qualifies her as one of the era’s unsung great executives, the circumstances of her original role as a landlord have become legend. Wojcicki once speculated that Google’s roots in a residential neighborhood led to the company’s famous practice of pampering its employees, where the workplace offered home-like amenities. “She emphasized the importance of providing essential services to young employees, saying, ‘Something as simple as a shower can make a big difference. When you’re attracting a young crowd, fresh out of college, offering conveniences like available food or access to a washer and dryer really matters.’ She mentioned that Google’s famous food culture started casually when she and her husband decided to get a refrigerator for the office kitchen. When the delivery person arrived, Wojcicki was in the shower.”Sergey and Larry opened the door and casually said, ‘Oh, the new fridge—just put it in the garage!’ That fridge ended up becoming the focal point of Google’s very first micro-kitchen,” she remembered.

In 2011, I interviewed Wojcicki at the WIRED Business Conference and asked her why, despite making so much money from her early stake in the company, she continued to work there. She flipped the question back at me, asking why I had written the Google book I had just published. Then she spoke from the heart. “Google is fascinating,” she said, “and the book isn’t finished yet. I’m making, living, building, and writing those chapters.” Her company, her family, and the entire business world will miss the chapters that remain unwritten.

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