Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, a tech pioneer and long-time Google government, died on Saturday after battling lung most cancers for 2 years.
“It’s with profound unhappiness that I share the information of Susan Wojcicki passing. My beloved spouse of 26 years and mom to our 5 kids left us at this time after 2 years of dwelling with non small cell lung most cancers,” Dennis Troper, Wojcicki’s husband, wrote in a submit on Fb.
Wojcicki was certainly one of Google’s earliest workers, having rented out her storage to co-founders Larry Web page and Sergey Brin in 1998, and he or she turned probably the most highly effective girls in tech in shepherding YouTube to a premier place in on-line video.
Underneath her management, YouTube grew to develop into the platform share chief in on-line video.
“During the last two years, at the same time as she handled nice private difficulties, Susan devoted herself to creating the world higher by her philanthropy, together with supporting analysis for the illness that in the end took her life,” wrote Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a weblog submit.
Pichai additionally highlighted Wojcicki’s advocacy round parental go away – she was the primary Google worker to take maternity go away – and her work on making YouTube a studying platform that celebrated “edutubers”.
Earlier than taking on the helm at YouTube in 2014, Wojcicki served because the senior vice chairman of Adverts at Google. She additionally co-created Google Picture Search, led Google’s first Video and Ebook search, in addition to early components of AdSense’s creation, and labored on the acquisitions of YouTube and DoubleClick.
Wojcicki stepped down from her position at YouTube in 2023 to give attention to “household, well being, and private initiatives.” She was succeeded by her longtime lieutenant, Neal Mohan.
“Right now we at Youtube misplaced a teammate, mentor, and buddy,” wrote Mohan in a submit on X.
“Twenty-five years in the past I made the choice to hitch a few Stanford graduate college students who have been constructing a brand new search engine. Their names have been Larry and Sergey,” wrote Wojcicki in her farewell weblog submit. “It might be among the finest choices of my life.”
