Technology pioneer Susan Wojcicki, 56, died Friday in California after a two-year battle with lung cancer, her family announced.
Wojcicki is the former chief executive officer of YouTube and pioneer of online communications, including helping launch Google and YouTube.
Her husband, Dennis Troper, said Wojcicki suffered from non-small cell lung cancer for the past two years.
“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 in a Facebook post.
We are heartbroken but grateful for the time we had with her,” Troper said, adding that she had an “immeasurable” impact on her family and the world.
Wojcicki was “one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley” and enabled Google’s two founders to work out of her garage before she became one of the search engine giant’s early employees, CNN reported.
While working for Intel in 1998, Wojcicki rented out her garage to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who were graduate students at Stanford and in the process of developing the search engine.
Wojcicki saw Google’s potential, became its marketing manager and stayed with the tech firm for 25 years.
Unbelievably saddened by the loss of my dear friend Susan Wojcicki after two years of living with cancer,” Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai said in a post on X. “She is a core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her.”
Wojcicki also served nine years as YouTube’s chief executive officer before resigning in 2023 to focus on her family, health and projects for which she was passionate.
Once described as the “most important Googler you’ve never heard of”, Ms Wojcicki was present at the company’s beginnings when, in 1998, she rented out her Menlo Park garage to the search engine firm’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
She was later persuaded to leave her job at chip giant Intel to join Google, becoming the firm’s 16th employee.
Ms Wojcicki would go on to lead YouTube, the online video sharing company owned by Google, for nine years until 2023 when she stepped down to focus “on my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about”.
Ms Wojcicki was one of relatively few women to hold a senior role in the technology industry.
She wanted to encourage more girls to go into the field, telling the BBC’s Newshour in 2013 that the future was going to be “increasingly digitally influenced”.
“But then I see there are very few women in the industry,” she said. “Overall the tech industry has, on average, probably about 20% women and I also look at the pipeline of girls coming out of technical degrees and it is very small.”
While Ms Wojcicki rose to become the boss of YouTube, her tenure was not without controversy. The platform faced criticism over its handling of online disinformation, including during the Covid pandemic.
In 2022, a number of fact-checking organisations wrote to her accusing YouTube of being “one of the major conduits of online disinformation and misinformation worldwide”.
Ms Wojcicki stepped down a year later to focus on her personal life and health.
Announcing her death “with profound sadness”, her husband Dennis Troper said: “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.”
By Agencies
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