Susan Wojcicki, who has died from lung cancer aged 56, became one of the most influential women in Silicon Valley after a pair of PhD students called Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google in her garage; she later joined their company, helping to generate the ubiquitous search engine’s vast advertising revenues, and in time she became chief executive of the Google-owned video platform YouTube.
In 1998 Susan Wojcicki (pronounced Woe-jiski) was working for the chipmaker Intel when she bought her quiet suburban home in Menlo Park, California, for $600,000. Needing help with her mortgage payments, she rented out her garage for $1,700 a month to Page and Brin, who soon expanded into three of her ground-floor rooms.
Despite their requests, she resisted working for them until 1999 when she joined them as employee number 16 (some reports say 18). “I was online desperately trying to search for something and couldn’t access Google for some reason and then couldn’t find any information I needed. I suddenly thought getting information you need is going to become very important online. That’s when I started working for Google,” she told The Daily Telegraph in 2010, in her West Coast drawl.
As marketing manager, Susan Wojcicki was tasked with raising Google’s profile. Working on a shoestring budget, she promoted the search engine by word of mouth, persuading companies to license Google search for their websites and offering it free to universities.
She refined the logo and championed Google Doodles, the variation on the logo used for holidays and special occasions; her first was an alien landing on Google. She also helped to develop Google Image Search, allowing users to search the internet by image rather than by words.
In 2003 she came up with Google AdSense, earning billions of dollars for the company by directing advertisers towards users. She also oversaw the company’s other advertising products, including AdWords and DoubleClick. Soon she was responsible for generating 97 per cent of Google’s revenues, which in the second quarter of this year alone were in excess of $84billion. This earned her a Google Founder’s Award, a financial incentive that provided the foundation for her personal fortune, estimated by Forbes at $800million.
Susan Wojcicki moved on to Google Video, the company’s video streaming platform, but it struggled. In 2006 she swallowed her pride and recommended the company’s $1.65billion purchase of YouTube. Eight years later she was appointed CEO of YouTube with a mandate to make the division profitable.
This propelled the usually reticent executive into the spotlight as she fought never-ending battles against online extremism and harmful content.
There was also trouble closer to home. In 2018 she spent 40 minutes hiding from a YouTube user who, furious about changes to the site’s policies, shot and injured three members of staff before taking her own life.
Critics accused YouTube of focusing on clicks, arguing that it paid only lip service to moderation. Susan Wojcicki, an unassuming figure, offered what seemed to many to be frustratingly corporate answers, insisting that the problem was complex one. “It’s not like there is one lever we can pull and say, ‘Hey, let’s make all these changes,’ and everything would be solved. That’s not how it works,” she told The New York Times.
Susan Diane Wojcicki was born in Santa Clara, California, on July 5 1968, the eldest of three daughters of Stanley Wojcicki, a Polish-born professor of physics at Stanford University, and his wife Esther, née Hochman, a journalist of Russian-Jewish descent. One of her sisters, Anne, co-founded the DNA testing company 23andMe and was married to Brin for six years.
They were educated at Gunn High School, Palo Alto, where Susan wrote for the school newspaper, The Oracle. At the age of 11 she started her first business, selling homemade “spice ropes” door to door. After reading history and literature at Harvard she took a master’s degree in economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and in 1998 received her MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her planned PhD in economics was sidetracked by positions at Intel and at the management consultancy Bain.
In an industry dominated by men, Susan Wojcicki was a powerful voice for women. She was a passionate campaigner for paid maternity leave in the US, one of the only countries in the developed world where it is not mandated by government. “Tech is an incredible force that will change our world in ways we can’t anticipate. If that force is only 20 to 30 per cent women, that is a problem,” she said.
Two years ago she stepped back from YouTube, saying she had “decided to start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about”. By then the platform had grown to 2.5 billion monthly users.
Susan Wojcicki married Dennis Troper, a financial consultant with Deloitte in San Francisco, in 1998. Five years later he too joined Google, becoming director of product management. They grew vegetables and made honey on their one-acre farm in Los Altos, California. He survives her with four of their five children; a son, Marco, died in February from a suspected drugs overdose.
Susan Wojcicki, born July 5 1968, died August 9 2024
