On August 9, 2024, Susan Wojcicki, former vice president of advertising at Google, CEO of YouTube, and the owner of the garage where Brin and Page started their startup, passed away. Without her, Google might not have existed at all — and certainly would not have become what it is today.
Twenty-six years ago, Intel employee Susan Wojcicki decided to rent out the garage in her home in Menlo Park, California. The tenants were two Stanford students — Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The Google startup was born in this garage.
Larry and Sergey begged Susan to join the team. She gave in in 1999 and became Google employee number 16. As a marketing manager, Wojcicki promoted the search engine through word of mouth, helped update the company logo, and championed the Doodles logos that appear on Google’s homepage to mark holidays and anniversaries.
“I saw the potential of what they were working on, which was incredibly exciting. Even though the company had few users and no revenue, I decided to join the team. It was one of the best decisions of my life,” Susan Wojcicki said.
In 2003, Wojcicki launched Google’s contextual advertising platform AdSense. It would go on to generate the lion’s share of Google’s billion-dollar revenue. And in 2007, she led the company’s acquisition of rival online advertising company DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.
Shaping YouTube’s Future
In 2005, Google Video launched. Anyone could upload a video to it, although the bulk of it was professional video content. Wojcicki was in charge of developing the platform.
Around the same time, former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim created YouTube. The service quickly gained popularity, becoming one of the fastest-growing sites on the Internet. In 2006, Wojcicki realized that a competitor had more prospects, and so she convinced Google’s management to buy YouTube for a fabulous $1.65 billion at that time.
Eight years later, in 2014, Susan Wojcicki became the CEO of YouTube. She was tasked with turning the video hosting service into a profitable business. This is how the paid subscription YouTube Red (later Premium) and the streaming television service YouTube TV appeared. And in 2020, on the wave of TikTok’s popularity, Wojcicki launched an analogue called YouTube Shorts.
Priscilla Lau, former YouTube Strategic Partnerships Manager, said, “They say that content creators are the driving force behind YouTube. Susan Wojcicki was the reason everyone at YouTube cared so much about creators. She kept us committed to YouTube’s mission: to give everyone a voice and show them the world.”
YouTube co-founder Steve Chen said the platform’s success is “directly due to the incredible way Susan ran the company.”
In 2023, Susan stepped away from the day-to-day running of YouTube to focus on her family and personal projects. In her obituary, her husband, Dennis Troper, said the successful businesswoman and mother of five had been battling lung cancer for two years.
As we reflect on Susan Wojcicki’s remarkable contributions to the tech industry, we’ll keep you updated on any developments regarding her legacy and the impact she had on Google and YouTube. Her vision and leadership have left an indelible mark on the digital landscape, shaping the way we interact with information and content online.