Susan Wojcicki, a pioneering technology executive who helped shape Google and YouTube, has died, her husband announced. She was 56.
Wojcicki played a key role in founding Google and served nine years as CEO of YouTube before stepping down last year to focus on her “family, health and personal projects that I am passionate about,” she said at the time.
She was one of the most respected female executives in a male-dominated technology industry.
His collaboration with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin began shortly after they spun off their search engine into a company in 1998. Wojcicki rented them the garage of his Menlo Park, California, home for $1,700 a month, cementing a formative partnership. Page and Brin, both 25 at the time, continued to refine their search engine in Wojcicki’s garage for five months before moving Google into a more formal office and then persuading their former landlord to come work for their company.
Wojcicki joined Google, now known as Alphabet, as a marketing executive in 1999 and held various roles as Google expanded its online advertising presence by acquiring YouTube in 2006 and DoubleClick in 2008. She served as Google’s senior vice president of advertising and commerce from 2011 to early 2014 and as CEO of YouTube from 2014 to 2023.
“Her loss is devastating for all of us who know and love her, for the thousands of Googlers she led over the years, and for the millions of people around the world who admired her, benefited from her advocacy and leadership, and felt the impact of the incredible things she created at Google, YouTube, and beyond,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a note to employees.
Former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who was Google’s vice president of sales and operations from 2001 to 2008 before joining Facebook, said in a Facebook post that Wojcicki had been a mentor in her tech career.
“She taught me the business and helped me navigate a growing and somewhat chaotic organization early in my tech career,” Sandberg wrote. “She was the person I turned to for advice. And she was that person for so many others, too.”
Her husband, Dennis Troper, announced her death in a social media post Friday evening.
“My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non-small cell lung cancer,” he wrote.
“Susan was not only my best friend and life partner, but also a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to many,” Troper said.
No further details about his death were immediately available.
Wojcicki and Troper’s son, Marco Troper, 19, died in February on the UC Berkeley campus where he resided as a freshman.
— By KEN MILLER and MAE ANDERSON Associated Press
