Sherwood News

Susan Wojcicki helped build YouTube into a billion-dollar advertising behemoth

8/12/24 10:50AM

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.

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1 year into the Switch 2, we might’ve seen the top of the console market

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GM has reportedly rehired more than 100 former Cruise employees, 18 months after shuttering the robotaxi unit

GM has rehired more than 100 employees it let go early last year when it shuttered Cruise, its former robotaxi business, according to reporting by The Information.

The hiring spree, which also includes employees from Nvidia and Uber, is geared toward ramping up GM’s plans for personal-use self-driving vehicles and not robotaxis. The former had been the focus of Cruise, prior to GM shuttering it in 2024.

Reporting last fall revealed that GM was attempting to rehire some former Cruise employees, but the scope of that effort wasn’t clear. More than 1,000 employees were laid off when the automaker scrapped Cruise, which it invested $10 billion into.

Google’s Waymo, Cruise’s former chief rival, is now worth $126 billion after a $16 billion funding round earlier this year. The company says it’s serving 500,000 paid robotaxi rides per week in the US.

Exclusive: With Some 100 Rehired Cruise Employees, GM Pursues Eyes-Off Autonomous Cars

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vsxy

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How Victoria’s Secret finally managed to get its sexy back

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With gas prices soaring, the humble sedan is making a comeback

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Franchise with that?

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McDonald’s has a new strategy: Make its stores “easier to run”

Franchised and affiliated locations already make up over 95% of McDonald’s store count and 62% of its sales.

Old McDonald's restaurant in Downey, Los Angeles, California, USA