Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki dies at 56
The ghosts still haunted the unassuming house in Menlo Park in California. It had only been vacant for a few years when I was there in 2008. The garage was once filled with newly delivered servers and routers. There were carpeted rooms at the back of the house where Page, Brin, and their first employee Craig Silverstein churned out code. Out the window was a backyard with a hot tub. The house was owned by Dennis Troper, Susan Wojcicki and their young son Craig Silverstein. They had just purchased the home for $615,000. The Google duo, to help pay for the mortgage, paid $1,700 per month in rent on the unused space. Wojcicki told me later that they entered the garage. “They weren’t allowed to enter the front door.”
Wojcicki found herself hanging out with the young founders and became fascinated by the rise of the search startup. She joined the company shortly after, around the time that the 15-person firm moved from her home to an actual office above a bike shop in Palo Alto. She took charge of the Google advertising division in 2002 and led it to become a multi-billion dollar company that revolutionized the industry. She became the CEO of YouTube in 2014, navigating the video platform through crises, competitions, and content moderation. She was one of the world’s most powerful businesswomen, but she kept it low-key until her departure from the company in February 2023. “To start a new Chapter focused on my Family, Health, and Personal Projects I am Passionate About,” she wrote in the blog. Troper announced that Susan Wojcicki had died on Friday. She was 56 years old. Wojcicki, who was already a calm and analytical person before Eric Schmidt took over as Google CEO, and became the “adult in the room”, had the wisdom and work ethic to be able to take on the most important roles at the company, as Alphabet grew into one of the most powerful companies. She was a relative elder compared to those in charge because of her education, which included a Harvard degree and an MBA at the Anderson School of Management, UCLA, as well as her Intel background. Wojcicki had been actively steering Google to profitability long before Schmidt arrived. In 2008, she said in an interview with me for my company’s history, “There was a shift where we realized we could make more money by advertising than syndicating web search.”
