(Bloomberg) -- Susan Wojcicki, an early Google executive and long-time head of its YouTube video service who shaped how fortunes and fame are created on the internet, has died. She was 56.
Wojcicki died after a two-year battle with cancer, according to social media posts by her husband, Dennis Troper, and Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of YouTube parent Alphabet Inc.
She announced plans in February 2023 to leave YouTube to focus on “my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about.” Neither she nor the company elaborated then on her health.
Wojcicki was among Google’s longest-serving employees and one of the highest-profile female executives in Silicon Valley. Few people had greater sway over the economics of the internet in the social media era.
From 2014 to 2023, she ran YouTube as CEO, cementing the video service’s status as a daily destination for billions of people and a stage for countless performers to launch careers. Before that, Wojcicki spent years managing systems that let virtually any digital publisher cash in on advertisements — and placed Google firmly at the center of the profitable enterprise.
But Wojcicki’s deeper influence came from her standing at Google, the unconventional search engine that transformed the web and Silicon Valley and is now part of Alphabet. Google’s first marketer and first landlord, she was trusted by company co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, technical visionaries with little interest in management.
It was a familial bond. Wojcicki’s younger sister, Anne, founder of the genetics testing company 23andMe, was married to Brin for several years. Early Google staff nicknamed Wojcicki “mini-CEO” — a rare executive who had the ear of the often inscrutable Page and Brin.
“Susan is the true godmother of Google,” Keval Desai, an investor and former Google colleague, said when Wojcicki left YouTube. “She is a person who had a bigger impact than any of her titles would suggest.”
Reserved Nature
At YouTube, Wojcicki made for an unusual media titan. She was reserved in nature, and her infrequent public appearances showed little taste for Hollywood showmanship. Yet she pushed to promote independent creators — the thousands of broadcasters who split ad revenue with YouTube — and compete directly with television and streaming services.
Outside Google’s world, Wojcicki was largely unknown. Other female managers from its rapid-growth years, such as Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer, moved to top roles elsewhere and frequently graced magazine covers. Wojcicki was a reluctant public speaker with little public profile. A 2011 Mercury News article dubbed her “the most important Googler you’ve never heard of” and described her as a “soccer mom” who prized getting home every night for dinner with her children.
The mother of five was one of a few women at the top ranks of the tech industry. “She is an inspiration to many, especially us working mothers,” Priscilla Lau, a veteran YouTube manager, wrote when Wojcicki stepped down.
Her company also faced a litany of scandals involving conspiracies, propaganda, violent ideologies and irascible stars that fueled a business crisis and turned the video platform into a battleground over speech, truth and internet governance. Wojcicki spent much of her tenure working to put safeguards in place and address concerns from sponsors, creators and regulators.
“We want to be on the right side of history,” she once told a key advertiser.
‘Do Something Meaningful’
Susan Diane Wojcicki was born on July 5, 1968, in Santa Clara, California, the southern tip of the sleepy suburban stretch that would soon become Silicon Valley.
Her father, Stanley, who as a youth had fled newly communist Poland, taught physics at Stanford University; her mother, Esther, worked as a journalist and teacher at the Palo Alto High School. In addition to Anne, Wojcicki had another younger sister, Janet, who became an anthropologist and epidemiologist.
Their parents “encouraged us to have interesting careers, to do something meaningful,” Wojcicki told the UK Evening Standard in 2017.
Wojcicki studied history at Harvard University, then worked as a photojournalist in India. Within a few years she returned to California to receive advanced degrees in economics and business before taking a marketing role with Intel Corp.
During that stint at Intel, a friend connected her with Brin and Page, then Stanford doctoral students looking for space to house their internet search upstart, Google.com. Wojcicki had purchased a home in Menlo Park, a town just north of Stanford. In 1998, she gave Brin and Page space in her garage, which became Google’s first office.
Decades later, Wojcicki confessed that she was initially skeptical of Google, since established search engines such as Yahoo and AltaVista seemed to have a lock on web surfing. Google quickly proved her wrong. She would call renting out her garage “one of the best decisions of my life.”
In 1999, Wojcicki joined the company as its 16th employee and first marketing manager, though Brin and Page didn’t give her a budget to promote their website. “It was a little overwhelming,” she recalled years later.
Parental Leave
Wojcicki pushed to get Google.com inside colleges, helped redesign the company’s original logo to remove its exclamation point and shaped much of its corporate culture. As the first employee to have a child at the company, she authored its parental leave policy, something the male programmers atop the company hadn’t considered.
Wojcicki managed key early services at the booming search engine, including image search and Google Video. But her most valuable project was AdSense, Google’s system for serving digital billboards everywhere from global newspapers to the smallest of blogs. Wojcicki pushed in 2007 for Google to buy DoubleClick, a competing web ad business, and spent the next seven years leading the combined operations.
This became Google’s second commercial pillar, a supplement to the profitable search ads and a bottomless money pit for its expansion into fields like self-driving cars and health. For many critics, display advertising was Google’s most noxious business; the system Wojcicki helped build was widely panned for using invasive data-gathering to shore up a monopoly.
Not many more had heard of Wojcicki when she was named YouTube chief three years later.
Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube in 2006, making an huge bet on the popular user-generated video site. As part of Google, YouTube expanded rapidly to viewers around the globe but struggled to find commercial footing. Media companies were reluctant to put their material on the free site, and marketers didn’t jump at backing amateur content.
Wojcicki’s arrival was a signal of Google’s interest in strengthening YouTube’s ad business. The new CEO attributed her interest in YouTube to her time running an erstwhile competitor, Google Video.
New Creators
“People want to see other people all over the world,” she told The New York Times in 2014. “They love their TV and they love their shows, but they’re also interested in seeing new and different creators and new and different types of video.”
Initially, Wojcicki focused YouTube on premium advertising, apps for music and kids and hitting an internal goal for a billion hours of daily viewing. Many of those plans, however, unraveled due to politics. Within her first year, YouTube saw an alarming rise of Islamist extremists who used YouTube to broadcast propaganda and gruesome footage.
After the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016, YouTube faced repeated criticism that its recommendation algorithms kept viewers in echo chambers and fed them outright falsehoods. YouTube stars acted out repeatedly. Advertisers boycotted. In 2019, YouTube was sued by the US government for violating online privacy laws for children.
Wojcicki spent years doing damage control and managed a significant recovery in its core business. YouTube’s ad sales more than tripled from 2017 to $29.2 billion in 2022. Yet the CEO often seemed more comfortable running an ads operation than a controversial social media property.
This approach did, however, help YouTube evade the harsh criticism of its peers. While the CEOs of Twitter Inc. and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. appeared multiple times in front of Congress, Wojcicki never did.
Steve Chen, one of YouTube’s co-founders, recalled that a chief concern about selling to Google was that the larger company might prioritize advertisers over YouTube’s viewers and creators.
Chen felt Wojcicki didn’t. “YouTube has performed exceptionally well under the leadership of Susan,” Chen said after she stepped down.
Wojcicki married Troper, a fellow veteran Google manager, in 1998. One of their children, son Marco, died by accidental drug overdose in February 2024 at age 19 at the UC Berkeley campus where he resided.
--With assistance from Ros Krasny.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.