Susan Wojcicki, a pioneering tech executive who helped shape Google and YouTube, has died, her husband said. She was 56.
One of the most respected women in the male-dominated tech industry, Wojcicki played a key role in Google’s creation and served nine years as YouTube’s CEO, stepping down last year to focus on her “family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about,” she said at the time.
Her husband, Dennis Troper, announced her death in a social media post late Friday. “My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non small cell lung cancer,” he wrote.
“Susan was not just my best friend and partner in life, but a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to many,” Troper said.
Wojcicki and Troper’s 19-year-old son, Marco Troper, died in February at the UC Berkeley campus where he resided as a freshman. According to the Chronicle, Troper had high concentrations of alprazolam (Xanax), cocaine, amphetamine and hydroxyzine in his system at the time of his death.
Wojcicki joined Google, now known as Alphabet, as marketing manager in 1999 and served in various positions as Google grew its online advertising presence by acquiring YouTube in 2006 and DoubleClick in 2008. She served as Google’s senior vice president of advertising and commerce from 2011 to early 2014 and CEO of YouTube from 2014 to 2023.
Her collaboration with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin began shortly after they incorporated their search engine into a business in 1998. Wojcicki rented the garage of her Menlo Park home to them for $1,700 a month, cementing a formative partnership. Page and Brin — both 25 at the time — continued to refine their search engine in Wojcicki’s garage for five months before moving Google into a formal office and later persuaded their former landlord to work for their company.
“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 millions of people all over the world who looked up to her, benefited from her advocacy and leadership, and felt the impact of the incredible things she created at Google, YouTube, and beyond,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a note to employees.
Former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who was vice president of Google’s sales and operations from 2001 to 2008, said in a Facebook post that Wojcicki was formative in her tech career.
“She taught me the business and helped me navigate a growing, fairly chaotic organization at the beginning of my career in tech,” Sandberg wrote. “She was the person I turned to for advice over and over again. And she was this person for so many others too.”
No other details of her death were immediately provided.
The San Francisco Standard staff contributed to this report.