Former CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, passed away at the age of 56 after battling cancer for two years. Wojcicki, one of the first employees at Google, was touted as a pioneer for women in tech. The former YouTube chief’s husband, Dennis Troper, announced her death on Friday.
“With profound sadness, Susan Wojcicki. 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,” Troper wrote in a Facebook post.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to express grief over the matter. “Unbelievably saddened by the loss of my dear friend @SusanWojcicki after two years of living with cancer,” he wrote in the post.
“She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her. She was an incredible person, leader, and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world, and I’m one of countless Googlers who is better for knowing her. We will miss her dearly. Our thoughts are with her family. RIP Susan,” the chief executive of Alphabet Inc added.
The life and legacy of Susan Wojcicki
One of the most notable women in tech, Wojcicki, joined Google in 1999 and became one of the first few employees of the web search company. In 2006, Google acquired YouTube for a whopping $1.65 billion. Before she was appointed as YouTube’s CEO, Wojcicki was senior vice president for ad products at Google.
After leading the video-sharing platform for nine years, she stepped down from her role and chose her deputy, Neal Mohan, a senior advertising and product executive, to take over her post. At that time, Susan said she was stepping down to focus on her “family, health, and personal projects.”
Meanwhile, Mohan, who succeeded Wojcicki, was also a long-term Google employee, having joined the company in 2008. Mohan also reacted to the tragic news. “Today we @youtube lost a teammate, mentor, and friend, @SusanWojcicki. I had the good fortune of meeting Susan 17 years ago. @youtube was the architect of the DoubleClick acquisition. Her legacy lives on in everything she touched on Google and YouTube,” Mohan wrote on X.
“I am forever grateful for her friendship and guidance. I will miss her tremendously. My heart goes out to her family and loved ones,” he added. After stepping down, Wojcicki planned to take on an advisory role at Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
“Twenty-five years ago, I decided to join a couple of Stanford graduate students who were building a new search engine. Their names were Larry and Sergey. It would be one of the best decisions of my life,” Wojcicki wrote in a blog post on the day she left YouTube. In the post, she referred to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
