Who was Susan Wojcicki? A look at the journey of YouTube’s former CEO

Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube was among Google’s longest-serving employees and one of the highest-profile Silicon Valley female executives. She passed away on Saturday, August 10, 2024 at the age of 54, having battled lung cancer for two years. Wojcicki’s husband Dennis Troper announced her demise on a Facebook post.
“It is with profound sadness that I share the news of Susan Wojcicki passing,” Troper wrote. “My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non-small cell lung cancer.”
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Here’s a look at Wojcicki’s journey to emerge as one of Silicon Valley’s most important figures.
Susan Diane Wojcicki was born on July 5, 1968, in Santa Clara, California, before it would become more famously known as Silicon Valley.
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Her father, Stanley Wojcicki was a professor of physics at Stanford University and her mother, Esther Wojcicki was a journalist and educator at the Palo Alto High School. Wojcicki’s younger sister Anne is an anthropologist and epidemiologist, who founded genetics testing company 23andMe, and was married to Google co-founder Sergei Brin for several years.
Wojcicki read history at Harvard University before working as a photojournalist in India. She returned to the US and earned an Economics degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, before getting an MBA from UCLA.
Her first stint in the tech world was at Intel in a marketing role where a mutual friend connected her with Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to whom, she gave space in her garage at her then-new home in Menlo Park. This was Google’s first office.
She called this, “one of the best decisions of my life.”
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Wojcicki joined the startup as its 16th employee as its marketing manager. She pushed for getting Google inside colleges and was responsible for redesigning the logo, removing its exclamation mark. Her most important project at Google was AdSense.
She became the CEO of YouTube in 2014 after Google bought it for $1.65 billion in 2006.
“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.” YouTube’s ad sales more than tripled from 2017 to $29.2 billion in 2022.
YouTube also faced multiple scandals during her tenure, including conspiracies, propaganda, and violent ideologies, turning the platform into a battleground over speech, truth and internet governance. She therefore, put a lot of safeguards in place to address concerns from sponsors, creators and regulators.
Wojcicki married Dennis Troper in 1998. He was a veteran Google manager. They had five children together. 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. However, their son Marco died in February 2024 aged 19 due to an accidental drug overdose.
Wojcicki announced in February 2023 that she would leave YouTube with the aim of focusing on “my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about,” not mentioning anything about her health.