Susan Wojcicki, the previous CEO of YouTube and one of the vital influential feminine executives in Silicon Valley, died on Friday after two years of residing with lung most cancers, the corporate introduced.
Wojcicki, who was 56, stepped down from the CEO job at YouTube final yr after greater than twenty years main numerous elements of Google and its father or mother firm Alphabet.
“At the same time as I write this it feels inconceivable to me that it’s true,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a word to staffers on Friday that was printed on the corporate web site.
“Her loss is devastating for all of us who know and love her, for the 1000’s of Googlers she led over time, and for hundreds of thousands of individuals everywhere in the world who seemed as much as her, benefited from her advocacy and management, and felt the influence of the unimaginable issues she created at Google, YouTube, and past.”
Wojcicki was a key determine at Google from the corporate’s earliest days, when she rented her Palo Alto storage to founders Larry Web page and Sergey Brin. She quickly stop her job at chipmaker Intel and joined the fledgling search startup, changing into its first advertising supervisor in 1999. Over time, she would oversee Google’s promoting enterprise and its video enterprise, taking part in a serious function within the firm’s transformation from startup into as we speak’s $2 trillion tech juggernaut.
The Wojcicki household grew to become generally known as one thing near Silicon Valley royalty. Wojcicki’s sister Anne, the founder and CEO of genetics testing firm 23andMe, was as soon as married to Google cofounder Brin. Her mom, Esther, based the journalism program at Palo Alto Excessive College, within the cradle of the tech business, and was acknowledged in a 2012 Digital Studying Day by then U.S. Training Secretary Arne Duncan for utilizing know-how successfully within the classroom.
Wojcicki’s husband, Dennis Troper, who’s a director of product managment at Google, wrote in a Fb put up on Friday that Wojcicki had been residing with “non small cell lung most cancers” for 2 years. “Susan was not simply my greatest pal and associate in life, however an excellent thoughts, a loving mom, and an expensive pal to many,” Troper wrote.
As YouTube’s boss, Wojcicki oversaw one of many world’s largest media websites, with an viewers that streams greater than 1 billion hours of video day by day. The video website, which Wojcicki pushed Google to amass in 2006, generated $8.7 billon in promoting income within the second quarter. Throughout the 9 years through which Wojcicki led YouTube as CEO, she turned the video website right into a dependable enterprise amid a altering market whereas additionally battling — not all the time efficiently — the rampant unfold of disinformation.
In an interview with Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell on the 2022 World Financial Discussion board in Davos, Wojcicki mentioned the challenges of regulating the content material it publishes on the location and that it recommends to customers.
“In case you are coping with a delicate topic like information, well being, science, we’re going to make it possible for what we’re recommending is coming from a trusted, well-known writer that may be dependable,” she stated.
She additionally addressed necessary points involving ladies within the office, together with the U.S. Supreme Court docket’s ruling that overturned the Roe vs. Wade determination guaranteeing ladies the suitable to abortion.
“My stance is that girls ought to have a selection after they develop into a mom. I imagine that’s actually necessary. I imagine that reproductive rights are human rights and to remove a legislation and a proper that we’ve had for nearly 50 years shall be an enormous setback for ladies. However that’s my private view,” she stated. “Working an organization that actually focuses on free speech, we wish to make it possible for we’re enabling a broad set of opinions that everybody has a proper to specific their viewpoint, offered they meet our group tips.”