Former YouTube CEO and Google executive Susan Wojcicki died Saturday at the age of 56, two years after being diagnosed with lung cancer. “It is with profound sadness that I share the news of the passing of Susan Wojcicki. My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us today after two years of living with non-small cell lung cancer,” Dennis Troper, Wojcicki’s husband, posted in a Facebook post.
Wojcicki was one of the most prominent women in technology, joining Google in 1999 to become one of the web search leader’s first employees, years before it acquired YouTube.
“Over the past two years, even as she faced great personal hardship, Susan dedicated herself to improving the world through her philanthropy, including supporting research into the disease that ultimately took her life,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post.
Before becoming YouTube CEO in 2014, Wojcicki was senior vice president of advertising products at Google.
After nine years at the helm, Wojcicki will step down from her role at YouTube in 2023 to focus on “family, health and personal projects.” She was replaced by her deputy, Neal Mohan, a senior advertising and product executive who joined Google in 2008. Wojcicki at the time was planning to take on an advisory role at Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
“Twenty-five years ago I made the decision to join a pair of Stanford graduate students who were building a new search engine. Their names were Larry and Sergey… It would be one of the best decisions of my life,” Wojcicki wrote in a blog post on the day she left YouTube, referring to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Wojcicki owned the garage where Page and Brin worked to found Google.
“Today at YouTube we lose a teammate, mentor and friend, Susan Wojcicki,” Mohan lamented in a post on X.
