Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who was one of Google’s first 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 she was battling non-small cell lung cancer. “My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us today after a 2-year battle with non-small cell lung cancer. Susan was not only my best friend and life partner, but also a brilliant mind, a loving mother and a dear friend to many,” Troper wrote along with some family photos.
He said her impact on the family and the world was “limitless.”
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 Palo Alto High School, reports Bloomberg.
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 obtain advanced degrees in economics and business. Later, she took a marketing role with Intel Corp.
3. When Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin turned the search engine into a business in 1998, Ms. Wojcicki rented out her garage in Menlo Park, California, for $1,700 a month. After working there for a few months, she later moved Google to a more formal office.
4. He was hired as Google’s 16th employee in 1999 and later worked on everything from AdSense, Google Analytics and Google Books to Google Images. In 2006, the company purchased his house to serve as a monument to his roots. At the same time, Brin became his brother-in-law and married his sister Anne in 2007. However, the former couple split in 2015.
5. Wojcicki championed YouTube’s $1.65 billion acquisition in 2006. As its CEO, she grew its audience to 2.5 billion monthly users. In February 2023, Ms. Wojcicki announced her decision to step down as YouTube’s CEO after spending nearly nine years at the front and center of the company.
From being one of Google’s earliest employees who helped start the company in her garage, to running the tech giant’s advertising business and then running YouTube for most of the last decade, Wojcicki’s journey has been that of a lifetime. Ms Wojcicki married Dennis Tropper, a veteran Google manager, in 1998. In February this year, one of their children – son Marco – died of an accidental drug overdose at the age of 19.
