Susan Wojcicki, the 16th Google employee who led YouTube during a period of explosive growth, has died. She was 56 and had been battling non-small cell lung cancer for two years, her husband Dennis Troper posted on Facebook. Wojcicki was one of the most famous women in Silicon Valley, CNN reports. She was working for Intel when she rented her garage in Menlo Park, California, to her friends Larry Page and Sergey Brin for $1,700 a month. Page and Brin worked there to develop a more intuitive algorithm for Internet searches, according to the Washington Post.
For nine years, Wojcicki was CEO of YouTube, whose parent company was Google. The number of monthly users doubled to over 2 billion during her tenure. As social media grew, online platforms were under pressure to do something about the spread of harmful content such as misinformation and hate speech. In 2019, she told Just She recognized that content moderation was a problem for YouTube. “I am responsible for this problem and I will solve it,” she said. Wojcicki resigned from YouTube last year, writing in a letter to staff: “I am so proud of everything we have accomplished. It has been exciting, meaningful and completely absorbing.”
In a statement after her death, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, “She is as central to Google’s story as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her.” Sheryl Sandberg, who was a Google executive under Wojcicki, paid tribute to her influence. “She taught me the business and helped me navigate a growing, fairly chaotic organization early in my career in the technology industry,” Sandberg wrote. “She was the person I turned to for advice time and time again.” (More obituaries.)
