EPASusan Wojcicki at the World Economic Forum in 2022
NOS Nieuws•gisteren, 12:21
Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube and Google pioneer, has died at the age of 56 from lung cancer. Wojcicki was considered one of the most powerful people in the tech world. She had been ill for more than two years.
“She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a statement. X.
Google in her garage
American Wojcicki grew up near Silicon Valley, the center of the technological world in San Francisco. She studied history and literature at the prestigious Harvard University, followed by studies in economics and business administration.
She got into tech through her friends Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In 1998, she rented her garage to the two Google founders, from where the company was run for the first few months. A year later, she started her own career within the company as a marketing manager. She was the sixteenth employee and was involved in setting up Google images and the advertising department, among other things. She is also the brain behind the interactive drawings that appear above Google’s search bar.
Shortly after its launch in 2005, Wojcicki saw YouTube’s potential. She advised the then Google director to take over the platform, she says years later in a interviewThis happened a year later and she eventually took over as CEO herself in 2014. Under her leadership, turnover grew from 4 to 31 billion euros in the following nine years.
Role model
Wojcicki has been a vocal advocate for more diversity in the male-dominated tech world. “Tech is incredibly powerful and will change our world in ways we can’t predict. If that world is only 20 to 30 percent women, that’s a problem,” she said in an interview. The magazine Time described her as “the most powerful woman on the internet”.
In 2023, she resigned after nearly 25 years to focus on family, health and other projects. In a farewell letter she reflected on her career and the early days in her garage. “I want to thank Larry and Sergey for the adventure of a lifetime.”
Google CEO Pichai said: “Susan, despite facing great personal challenges, spent the past two years working to make the world a better place through her philanthropy, including supporting research into the disease that ultimately took her life. We will miss her deeply.”
