Google started in the garage of her Silicon Valley home. Susan Wojcicki developed Google’s advertising business, transformed YouTube into an internet giant, helped bloggers and content creators monetize their work, and earned a fortune. She was estimated to be worth $765 million in 2022. Yet the 56-year-old, who died on August 9 after a two-year battle with lung cancer, was called “the most important Googler you’ve never heard of”.
Married to Google executive Dennis Troper, the mother of five remained largely unknown outside Googleverse, shunning fame and celebrity.
Early life
Wojcicki grew up on the Stanford University campus, where her father was a physicist. Her mother was a journalist and a teacher. She studied history and literature at Harvard, did a stint as a photojournalist in India, and then earned a master’s in economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MBA at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Anderson School of Management.
Wojcicki worked in a marketing role at chipmaker Intel before joining Google.
Google days
A friend introduced her to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then Stanford graduate students who wanted a place to set up their start-up, Google. She and her husband rented the ground floor and garage of their house at Menlo Park to the young technopreneurs.
Initially, she was sceptical of their prospects as the search engines Alta Vista and Yahoo were already established players.
However, she changed her mind, realized the potential of Google, and became its 16th employee and first marketing manager.
She was pregnant with her first child when she joined Google in 1999.
Rising up the ranks, Wojcicki played a key role in transforming the internet search engine into a goldmine.
Work for Google
She helped develop products such as Google image search, now called Google Images, which can search the World Wide Web for images, and the AdSense network through which websites can make money by displaying ads served up by Google.
In 2007, she persuaded Google to buy DoubleClick, a competing web ad business, increasing Google’s clout in digital advertising.
As advertisers flocked to Google, deserting traditional media, AdWeek, the industry chronicle, wondered in 2013 whether Wojcicki was “the most important person in advertising”.
By the time she was moved from overseeing Google’s mammoth advertising business in 2014 to running the video streaming platform YouTube, its revenues had ballooned to more than $50 billion.
‘Mini CEO’
Early Google employees called her “mini CEO” because she was very close to the Google founders. This relationship was reinforced by family ties as her younger sister, Anne, was married to Brin for several years.
“Susan is the true godmother of Google,” said Keval Desai, her former colleague. “She is a person who had a bigger impact than any of her titles would suggest.”
YouTube
Wojcicki’s other major contribution was the acquisition of YouTube.
She persuaded Google to buy YouTube, a competitor to Google Videos, which she was overseeing, in 2006. Bought for $1.65 billion, YouTube became a valuable social media platform, absorbing Google Videos and extending Google’s reach beyond the search and digital advertising business.
Wojcicki, who became chief executive officer of YouTube in 2014, made bold innovations.
She oversaw the growth of the “creator economy”.
She wanted to promote independent content creators—the thousands of broadcasters who split ad revenue with YouTube—and compete directly with television networks and streaming services.
To help YouTube grow, she introduced new kinds of advertising and new subscription services, including YouTube Premium, YouTube TV and YouTube Music.
Her efforts paid off.
YouTube had 2.5 billion monthly active users and nearly $30 billion in annual ad revenues in 2023 when she stepped down as CEO, saying she wanted to focus on her family, health and personal projects.
But her retirement was marred by personal tragedy. Her 19-year-old son, Marco Troper, was found dead in his dorm room at the University of California, Berkeley, in February. The authorities concluded he had an accidental drug overdose.
‘Right side of history’
Wojcicki’s decade-long reign at YouTube had been roiled by challenges and controversies. YouTube had faced ad boycotts over the years, the biggest in 2017 after ads began appearing alongside offensive content, prompting Wojcicki to hire more moderators.
“We want to be on the right side of history,” she said.
It’s too early to tell what history’s verdict will be, but she can’t be written off any history of Googleverse.
As Sundar Pichai wrote on X: “She is as core to the history of Google as anyone…”
Unbelievably saddened by the loss of my dear friend @SusanWojcicki after two years of living with cancer. She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her. She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous…
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) August 10, 2024
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