Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Started Career As Photojournalist In India

Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who was also one of the first Google employees, has died after a two-year battle with cancer. She was 56.

In a post on Facebook, Ms Wojcicki’s husband Dennis Troper said that she was battling non-small cell lung cancer. “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. Susan was not just my best friend and partner in life, but a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to many,” Troper wrote alongside a few family photographs.

He noted that her impact on the family and the world was “immeasurable.” 

Who was Susan Wojcicki?

1. Born on July 5, 1968, in Santa Clara, California, she was the daughter of Stanley, who taught physics at Stanford University. Her mother Esther worked as a journalist and teacher at the Palo Alto High School, Bloomberg reported.

2. Ms Wojcicki studied history at Harvard University and later worked as a photojournalist in India. Within a few years, she returned to California to receive advanced degrees in economics and business. Later on, she took up a marketing role with Intel Corp.

3. In 1998, when Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated the search engine into a business, Ms Wojcicki rented the garage of her home in Menlo Park, California, to them for $1,700 a month. After working there for a few months, they later moved Google into a more formal office.

4. She was hired in 1999 as the 16th employee of Google and later went on to work towards everything from AdSense, Google Analytics and Google Books to Google Images. In 2006, the company bought her home to serve as a monument to its roots. At the same time, Brin became her brother-in-law and married her sister, Anne, in 2007. However, the former couple parted ways in 2015.

5. Wojcicki had in 2006 advocated for the $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube. Being its CEO, she went on to expand its viewership to 2.5 billion monthly users. In February 2023, Ms Wojcicki announced her decision to step down as YouTube’s CEO after spending around nine years of being the front and centre of the company.

From being one of the early employees of Google who helped jumpstart the company in her garage to running the tech giant’s advertising business and then YouTube for most of the past decade, Wojcicki has had a journey of a lifetime. Ms Wojcicki married Dennis Troper, who was a fellow veteran Google manager, back in 1998. In February this year, one of their children — son Marco — passed away due to an accidental drug overdose at the age of 19.