Susan Wojcicki helped build YouTube into a billion-dollar advertising behemoth
Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, employee number 16 at Google, and one-time landlord for the tech company’s founders in the late 90s, died at 56 after living with lung cancer for 2 years, according to a Facebook post from her husband on Friday.
Current Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai paid tribute in a memo to employees, highlighting Wojcicki’s role in building the Google ad business, her work leading YouTube, and her parental leave advocacy (Wojcicki was the first Googler to take maternity leave) which “set a new standard for businesses everywhere”.
Platform pioneer
Wojcicki has been credited with convincing the Google board to stump up the $1.65 billion for YouTube in 2006, as Google Video, the unit she oversaw at the time, struggled to compete.
8 years later, she was made CEO of the video-sharing platform, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that YouTube made about $4 billion in the year that Wojcicki took the helm. Per Alphabet’s latest annual report for 2023 — the year that Wojcicki resigned to focus on her family, health, and personal projects — adverts made the company $31.5 billion. That figure was up ~690% since 2014 and accounted for more than 10% of Alphabet’s overall revenue for the year.
