Susan Wojcicki, the previous CEO of YouTube and one of the crucial 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 CEO job at YouTube final 12 months after greater than 20 years main numerous elements of Google and its Alphabet mother or father firm.
“At the same time as I write this it feels inconceivable to me that it’s true,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a be aware to staffers on Friday that was revealed 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 through the years, 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 impression 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 give up her job at chipmaker Intel and joined the fledgling search startup, turning into its first advertising supervisor in 1999. Over time, she would oversee Google’s promoting enterprise and its video enterprise, enjoying a significant function within the firm’s transformation from startup into at this time’s $2 trillion tech juggernaut.
The Wojcicki household turned often called 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. Schooling 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 publish on Friday that Wojcicki had been residing with “non small cell lung most cancers” for 2 years. “Susan was not simply my finest good friend and associate in life, however a superb thoughts, a loving mom, and an expensive good friend to many,” Troper wrote.
As YouTube’s boss, Wojcicki oversaw one of the crucial world’s largest media websites, with an viewers that streams a couple of billion hours of video daily. The video website, which Wojcicki pushed Google to amass in 2006, generated $8.7 billon in promoting income within the second quarter. Through 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 at all times 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.
“If you’re coping with a delicate topic like information, well being, science, we’re going to ensure that what we’re recommending is coming from a trusted, well-known writer that may be dependable,” she mentioned.
She additionally addressed essential points involving ladies within the office, together with the U.S. Supreme Court docket’s ruling overturning of the Roe vs. Wade determination guaranteeing ladies the proper to abortion.
“My stance is that girls ought to have a alternative after they turn out to be a mom. I imagine that’s actually essential. I imagine that reproductive rights are human rights and to remove a legislation and a proper that we’ve had for nearly 50 years might be an enormous setback for girls. However that’s my private view,” she mentioned. “Working an organization that actually focuses on free speech, we wish to ensure that we’re enabling a broad set of opinions that everybody has a proper to precise their viewpoint, offered they meet our neighborhood tips.”
