Former YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki dies at 56

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Susan Wojcicki, one of Google’s earliest employees and the former chief executive of its video website YouTube, has died aged 56.

In the male-dominated tech industry, Wojcicki became one of Silicon Valley’s most influential women, helping to create Google’s all-conquering advertising business.

Her husband Dennis Troper announced her death on Facebook. “It is with profound sadness that I share the news of Susan Wojcicki passing,” he said. “My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after two years of living with non-small cell lung cancer.”

He called her “a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to many”.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google parent Alphabet, said in a post on X that he was “unbelievably saddened”.

“She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her,” he said. “She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world.”

During Google’s earliest days, its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin built the search engine while working in Wojcicki’s garage at her home in Menlo Park. In 1999, she became its 16th employee. During her tenure overseeing its advertising business, Google’s ad revenues grew from zero to more than $50bn in 2013.

After being involved in Google’s $1.65bn acquisition of YouTube in 2006, she became the video site’s chief executive in 2014. By the time she stepped down in February last year, YouTube had grown to more than 2.5bn monthly active users and nearly $30bn in annual ad revenues.

“Susan was a trailblazer in the industry, an exemplary mother, and a cherished friend,” said Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com, where she was a board member.

During more than 20 years at Google, Wojcicki wore “many hats”, as she put it when she left — including helping to create Google Image Search and its AdSense advertising network before becoming its senior vice-president of advertising and commerce.

At YouTube, she nurtured the development of the “creator economy”, while also fending off controversies over its content moderation and video-recommendation algorithm.

In an internal memo announcing her departure last year, she wrote: “25 years ago I made the decision to join a couple of Stanford graduate students who were building a new search engine . . . I saw the potential of what they were building, which was incredibly exciting, and although the company had only a few users and no revenue, I decided to join the team. It would be one of the best decisions of my life.”

Details of her health were not widely known. Just last month, she joined the board of directors at Planet Labs, a satellite imaging and data company.

Before Google, Wojcicki worked at chipmaker Intel and as a management consultant. Her mother Esther Wojcicki is a journalist and her father Stanley Wojcicki, a renowned Stanford physics professor, died last year.

She has two sisters: Anne Wojcicki, the co-founder and chief executive of biotech company 23andMe, who was married to Brin until 2015, and Janet Wojcicki, a professor of paediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.

Tragedy hit the family earlier this year when Wojcicki’s 19-year-old son Marco Troper died. He was a student at the University of California, Berkeley.