Both Google and YouTube would have existed without Susan Wojcicki’s contributions. But during nearly a quarter century as a Googler, she was utterly critical to both companies’ success at multiple junctures. That included bringing YouTube into the Google fold in the first place and then taking the video site to 2.5 billion users and $29 billion in annual revenue as its longest-serving CEO. Wojcicki died on Friday at age 56, two years after being diagnosed with lung cancer and 18 months after stepping down as YouTube’s CEO.
In one of the most iconic bits of Google lore, Wojcicki, then an Intel manager, rented her garage to Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998 as the startup was just spinning up. She later became its 16th employee, at first overseeing marketing and then helping to devise AdWords, the system for auctioning off text ads that turned its search engine into a phenomenally profitable business. Named senior VP of advertising & commerce, she grew the advertising operation to $55 billion in revenue by 2013.
In 2006, Wojcicki urged Google to acquire YouTube, when skeptics thought the video-sharing fledgling was destined to be crushed by lawsuits from the copyright owners whose content its users uploaded without authorization. The following year, she spearheaded Google’s acquisition of display-advertising giant DoubleClick. Both purchases propelled the company to have even more overwhelming influence on how digital content was consumed and monetized. In 2014, she became YouTube’s CEO, as the company was still figuring out how to help creators build real livelihoods on its platform, a process Nicole Laporte detailed at the time in a Fast Company story.
In 2017, after Wojcicki had made progress on that front and YouTube had grown only more central to how the world finds and watches video, I profiled her for another Fast Company feature. The project involved multiple interviews and watching her at work in several contexts: at 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 staff meeting at the company’s campus. For someone who had accomplished so much at the highest levels of her industry, she came off as disarmingly normal and lacking in ego. At the advertiser event, she even apologized to the attendees—YouTube had recently been in the news for pairing brand ads with videos that included terrorist and white-supremacist messages—in a way few CEOs could have pulled off.
Wojcicki may have had an unassuming air, but she was also indomitable, her colleagues stressed to me. YouTube VP of engineering Scott Silver said she was “as nice as she seems, but she doesn’t ever give up,” while Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr, who first met her at a Google party held in her garage, described her as both “aggressive” and “calm.” Sundar Pichai, her boss, told me she “has always been someone who could do pretty much anything.” (That includes spotting talent: In 2004, she helped get him hired as a Google product manager, 11 years before he succeeded Page as the company’s CEO.)
As for my conversations with Wojcicki herself, the moment I’ll never forget related not to her career but to her beaming pride in a sculpture by one of her five kids:
When I visit her office at Google’s Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California (where she works one day a week and really does have a mountain view), even before she’s shared her perspective on creators and markets, Wojcicki doesn’t start our conversation with her perspective on creators or marketers. Rather, she proudly shows me a small sculpture that her 9-year-old daughter made for her. Fashioned from Tinkertoys and cardboard, the inspirational artwork is emblazoned with slogans such as “Fairness is for everyone,” “Don’t go backward, go forward,” and, at the top, “I see the future in your eyes.” High expectations follow her wherever she goes.
One of Wojcicki’s children, a 19-year-old student at UC Berkeley, died last February of an accidental drug overdose. Her husband, Dennis Troper, is himself a 20-plus-year Google veteran. Wojcicki came from a family of overachievers: Her sister Anne Wojcicki is cofounder of genetic testing company 23andMe; and another sister, Janet Wojcicki, is a pediatrics professor. Their mother, Esther Wojcicki, is an educator; their father, physicist Stanley Wojcicki, died in May 2023.
By Harry McCrackenK
