Susan Wojcicki, the former chief executive of YouTube and a long-time Google executive, died Saturday (Aug. 10) at the age of 56 after a two-year battle with lung cancer.
“It is with deep sadness that I announce that Susan Wojcicki, my loving wife of 26 years and mother of our five children, passed away today after a two-year battle with non-small cell lung cancer,” Wojcicki's husband Dennis Troper said in a Facebook post.
“Over the past two years, despite facing enormous personal challenges, Susan remained committed to making the world a better place through her philanthropic work, including supporting research for the disease that ultimately took her life,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post.
One of the most prominent women in tech, Wojcicki joined Google in 1999 as one of the company's first employees, a few years before Google acquired YouTube.
Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion.
Before becoming YouTube CEO in 2014, Wojcicki was senior vice president of advertising products at Google.
After nine years at the helm, Wojcicki is stepping down from her YouTube role in 2023 to focus on “family, health, and personal projects.” She will be replaced by Neal Mohan, her deputy, a senior advertising and product executive who joined Google in 2008. At the time, Wojcicki planned to take 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 turn out to be one of the best decisions of my life,” Wojcicki wrote in a blog post the day she left YouTube, referring to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
“Today we at YouTube lost a teammate, mentor, and friend, Susan Wojcicki,” Mohan said in a post on X. (ah/ft)
