The early loss of life of Silicon Valley veteran and former YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki this weekend has prompted an outpouring of condolences from Huge Tech heavyweights for an promoting visionary who was additionally recognized for being a vocal champion of girls in enterprise.
Wojcicki, who has died aged 56 after a two-year battle with lung most cancers, was instrumental in rising Google’s mammoth promoting enterprise. By the point she had moved from overseeing it in 2014 to operating the video streaming platform YouTube it had ballooned to greater than $50bn in revenues.
Google’s sixteenth worker, Wojcicki was a pivotal determine at what has grow to be one of many world’s most influential corporations. She helped steer the evolution of how folks — from particular person creators to large advertisers — make and spend cash on-line.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s mum or dad Alphabet, described Wojcicki as being “as core to the historical past of Google as anybody”.
When saying her resignation as CEO of Google-owned YouTube final 12 months, Wojcicki stated she had dreamt of working for a corporation “with a mission that might change the world for the higher”, and thanked its co-founders for “the journey of a lifetime” throughout her 25-year tenure.
Wojcicki studied historical past and literature at Harvard college, however displayed a prescient curiosity within the worth of know-how and coding. She later defined that she believed that “coding is like writing — and we stay in a time of the brand new industrial revolution”.
After a stint as a photojournalist in India, she undertook a masters diploma in economics on the College of California earlier than embarking on an MBA.
After college, Wojcicki took a job at chipmaker Intel. However Google co-founders Larry Web page and Sergey Brin had been renting out her storage as they developed the eponymous search engine, and Wojcicki was intrigued.
Whereas pregnant together with her first little one in 1999, she gambled and took a job on the start-up. She later stated that, though she had considered the pair as “college students who had been doing their first firm”, she had seen the “potential of what they had been constructing”.
The transfer marked an inflection level in Wojcicki’s profession, and amounted to “among the best selections of my life”, she stated final 12 months.
At Google, Wojcicki rose up the ranks to finally lead its promoting enterprise, and helped construct a number of core merchandise, together with Google picture search and the AdSense promoting community that later drew the ire of antitrust authorities within the EU and US.
Within the early days, Wojcicki was “shepherding [the ads business] not only for Google however for the complete business,” on condition that it was a “nascent” area, Keval Desai, a tech investor who labored alongside Wojcicki at Google for a number of years, informed the FT.
A non-public one who didn’t court docket the limelight in the way in which of some Silicon Valley executives, Mercury Information in 2011 topped her “a very powerful Googler you’ve by no means heard of”. AdWeek mused in 2013 on whether or not Wojcicki was “a very powerful particular person in promoting”.
Her position in Google’s 2006 acquisition of YouTube, which she would go on to guide for nearly a decade, was one other defining second. Alive to the corporate’s fast-growing video enterprise and the potential for different corporations to swoop in and purchase it, Wojcicki sketched out a case for purchasing it in “in all probability . . . an hour”, she stated later.
Her imaginative and prescient for the platform was dynamic and developed at tempo with the fast-moving streaming and advert areas. From when she took over in 2014, she oversaw the expansion of the “creator economic system”, and in 2020 launched YouTube Shorts in response to rising competitors from video platform TikTok.
“Creators are the beating coronary heart of YouTube”, however Wojcicki was “the explanation everybody at YouTube cared so deeply about these creators” whom she “went out of her approach to meet,” stated Priscilla Lau, who labored alongside her at YouTube for nearly a decade.
Wojcicki additionally presided over the expansion of YouTube’s promoting enterprise which, like social community Fb, more and more stole promoting {dollars} from linear tv. She launched its ad-free paid tier in 2015, and by the point she stepped down final 12 months YouTube had greater than 2.5bn month-to-month energetic customers and practically $30bn in annual advert revenues.
YouTube cofounder Steve Chen informed the FT the “success” that the platform had continued to see “has very immediately tied to the unimaginable, inclusive technique by which Susan ran the corporate”.
“She was extremely affected person and attentive to the opinions of everybody that labored at Google and YouTube,” he added.
With the explosion of content material on social media and streaming websites got here controversy, nevertheless, and Wojcicki was among the many tech chiefs pressured to grapple with the problem of learn how to police problematic content material.
YouTube was hit with an advertisers boycott in 2017 after advertisements started showing alongside offensive and excessive content material, prompting Wojcicki to rent extra moderators and be part of different social media chiefs who had been pledging to do higher.
However Wojcicki was not topic to the identical scrutiny because the Fb and X founders Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, the larger public personalities who had been hauled up in entrance of US lawmakers quite a few occasions to be grilled. That led some to fret that the dimensions of the issue on YouTube itself was not being sufficiently scrutinised.
The daughter of journalist Esther Wojcicki, who wrote a e book about “learn how to elevate profitable folks”, Wojcicki may also be remembered as an inspiration to ladies in tech, an advocate of the significance of office range and a pioneer of paid parental depart throughout the male-dominated tech business.
The mom of 5 turned Google’s first worker to go on maternity depart, and her advocacy round parental depart “set a brand new customary for companies in all places,” wrote Pichai this weekend.
Regardless of her success, Wojcicki wrote in a 2017 Fortune column that she had “again and again” as a girl and mom confronted questions on her means and dedication to her work.
That very same 12 months, public allegations of gender discrimination within the tech sector prompted Wojcicki to write down in Vainness Honest that she was “annoyed that an business so fast to embrace and alter the long run can’t break freed from its regrettable previous” and demand that tech CEOs “make gender range a private precedence”.
Former Fb chief working officer Sheryl Sandberg described Wojcicki as “probably the most essential ladies leaders in tech — the primary to guide a significant firm”, including: “I don’t imagine my profession can be what it’s in the present day with out her unwavering assist.”
“She confirmed ladies that it was attainable to excel in a thriving profession and nonetheless be residence by 6pm to have dinner with their households,” stated Lau.
Wojcicki’s battle with most cancers was not broadly recognized, although she stated when stepping down from YouTube final 12 months that she deliberate to “begin a brand new chapter targeted on my household, well being and private tasks I’m keen about”. A short while later her son Marco Troper died tragically from an overdose whereas a pupil at Berkeley.
The outpouring of condolences and fond recollections of Wojcicki since her loss of life was introduced has been placing.
Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton highlighted Wojcicki’s means to nurture an concept into “one thing that adjustments the world” and stated she would “miss her brilliance, her kindness, and all she did to open alternatives in tech to folks of all backgrounds”.
Desai stated she had been “concerned in each single essential resolution that Google ever made.” The corporate’s “perception that doing good is the first north star is due to Susan,” he stated.
A number of folks stated Wojcicki had been an empathetic chief and a relaxed negotiator who spoke in plain phrases and was capable of win and retain the belief of the Google founders.
Wojcicki is survived by her husband, Denis Troper, and her 4 remaining youngsters, in addition to her two sisters, Janet and Anne — the latter co-founded biotech firm 23andMe and was married to google founder Brin till 2015.
“She was very all the way down to earth,” Hadi Partovi, chief of instructional non-profit Code.org on whose board Susan Wojcicki sat, informed the FT.
“It’s unhappy for the tech business to have misplaced considered one of its best.”
