Susan Wojcicki, the previous CEO of YouTube and one among Silicon Valley’s most influential female executives, died Friday after battling lung cancer for 2 years, the corporate said.
Wojcicki, 56, stepped down as CEO of YouTube last 12 months after leading various parts of Google and its parent company Alphabet for greater than twenty years.
“Even as I write this, it seems impossible that this is true,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a note to employees on Friday. published on the corporate’s website.
“Her loss is devastating for all of us who know and love her, for the thousands of Googlers she led over the years, and for the millions of people around the world who looked up to her, benefited from her dedication and leadership, and felt the impact of the incredible things she created at Google, YouTube, and beyond.”
Wojcicki was a key figure at Google from the start, when she rented her Palo Alto garage to founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Soon after, she quit her job at chipmaker Intel and joined the fledgling search engine startup, becoming its first marketing manager in 1999. Over the years, she oversaw Google’s promoting and video businesses and played a key role in transforming the corporate from a startup into today’s $2 trillion tech giant.
The Wojcicki family became generally known as a sort of Silicon Valley elite. Wojcicki’s sister Anne, founder and CEO of the genetic testing company 23andMe, was once married to Google co-founder Brin. Her mother Esther founded the journalism program at Palo Alto High School, within the cradle of the technology industry, and was honored by then-US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at Digital Learning Day in 2012 for the effective use of technology within the classroom.
Wojcicki’s husband, Dennis Troper, head of product management at Google, wrote in a Facebook post on Friday that Wojcicki had been affected by “non-small cell lung cancer” for 2 years. “Susan was not only my best friend and partner, but also a brilliant mind, a loving mother and a dear friend to many,” Troper wrote.
As YouTube’s CEO, Wojcicki led one among the world’s largest media sites, with audiences streaming greater than a billion hours of video every single day. The video site, which Wojcicki bought from Google in 2006, brought in $8.7 billion in promoting revenue within the second quarter. During the nine years Wojcicki led YouTube as CEO, she made the video site a reliable player in a changing market while also battling… not all the time successful – the rampant spread of disinformation.
In an interview with Assets Wojcicki, Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell, discussed the challenges of regulating the content published on the positioning and advisable to users on the 2022 World Economic Forum in Davos.
“When it comes to sensitive topics such as news, health or science, we make sure our recommendations come from a trusted, well-known and reliable publisher,” she said.
She also addressed vital issues affecting women within the workplace, including the U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning the Roe v. Wade Decision that guarantees women the precise to abortion.
“My position is that women should have a choice when they become mothers. I think that’s really important. I believe that reproductive rights are human rights and that to take away a law and a right that we’ve had for almost 50 years would be a huge setback for women. But that’s my personal view,” she said. “As we run a company that really focuses on free speech, we want to make sure that we allow for a wide range of opinions and that everyone has the right to express their point of view as long as it complies with our community guidelines.”
