Behind YouTube’s quest to make stars out of small creators around the world was Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of the platform from 2014 till she stepped down in February 2023. She lost her battle with cancer at age 56.
Among the most prominent women in Silicon Valley, her name will forever be associated with Google. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to form Google, they rented space at Wojcicki’s garage for $1,700 a month in 1998 (the company moved to an actual office space in Palo Alto, California in 1999). Back then she was working in the marketing department at Intel and had mortgages to pay.
The following year, Wojcicki became Google’s 16th employee, working as its first marketing manager. The connection between Wojcicki and Sergey Brin was extended when he married her sister, Anne, in 2007 (they divorced in 2015).
Soon after Google acquired YouTube in 2006, she helped turn the video platform into one of the world’s most favourite virtual destinations among the youth.
Under her, there was an important expansion of YouTube’s Creator programme that helped creators monetise their work. It was during her tenure that YouTube started adding to Google’s bottom line. It went from $3.6 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2018, when Google first broke out YouTube’s financial numbers, to nearly $8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Wojcicki also navigated the video platform through controversies around content moderation, new competitive threats from services like ByteDance’s TikTok, and a rocky phase during Donald Trump’s presidency.
During Trump’s White House days, the platform had to deal with issues around extremism, disinformation and child safety. Several advertisers boycotted the site in 2017 but Wojcicki was able to win back advertisers.
While stepping down as CEO, she named Neal Mohan, whose parents are from Lucknow, as successor. Mohan joined YouTube in 2015 after serving as senior vice-president of display and video ads at Google.
In February this year, she and her husband, Dennis Troper, suffered heartbreak when they lost their son, Marco Troper, who died of an accidental overdose in his dorm room at the University of California, Berkeley.
Wojcicki’s family ties run deep in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. Her sister Anne Wojcicki is the CEO of the personal genomics company 23andMe. Her other sister, Janet, is a professor of paediatrics at the University of California while their mother Esther is a renowned educator.
Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, said in a statement: “She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her.”
