Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, a Silicon Valley native and technology pioneer, has died after a two-year battle with cancer, her family announced. She was 56 years old.
“We are heartbroken but grateful for the time we had with her,” Troper added. “Please keep our family in mind as we go through this difficult time.”
Wojcicki first got here into contact with YouTube's parent company Google when she rented her Menlo Park garage to co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, then students at Stanford. They lived within the university's dormitory and needed space to develop a brand new search engine that may later grow to be Google. Soon after, Wojcicki joined the corporate as its sixteenth worker – while pregnant together with her first child – and worked at Google for nearly 25 years.
Wojcicki was “a central part of Google’s history,” wrote current Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a X-Post Friday night. “It's hard to imagine the world without her. She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world, and I am one of countless Googlers who knew her better. We will miss her greatly.”
Ron Conway, a distinguished early-stage Silicon Valley investor, said Wojcicki was “one of the kindest, most thoughtful people and also a great mother,” in a Saturday morning interview. X-Post“Let us strive to follow her example and make the world a better place in her honor.”
Conway, one in every of Google's early investors, described Wojcicki as “one of the greatest contributors to the tech community.”
When she began working at Google, Wojcicki led the initial development of products corresponding to Google Images and Google Books, in keeping with CNN. She later became the corporate's senior vp of promoting and commerce and led its flagship AdSense – an initiative that allowed web sites to become profitable by displaying Google ads. Under Wojcicki's leadership in 2010, AdSense distributed greater than $6 billion in promoting revenue to the greater than 1 million web sites that used the service and was Google's second-largest income.
Wojcicki is stepping down in 2023 to “start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects that are close to my heart,” the Bay Area News Group previously reported. She married Troper, himself a Google executive, in 1998 and had five children. Their 19-year-old son, Marco Troper, died of an accidental drug overdose in his dorm at UC Berkeley this February.
Wojcicki grew up in Palo Alto, where her father Stanley Chair Stanford's physics department and her mother Esther worked as an educator and journalist. Her sisters are Janet, a health care provider and professor at UCSF, and Anne, co-founder of Mountain View-based DNA testing company 23andMe.
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