Susan Wojcicki, Former YouTube CEO and Influential Google Exec, Dies at 56 (2024)

Susan Wojcicki, who served as CEO of YouTube for nine years during a period of massive growth for the video platform and was one of Google‘s first hires, died on Friday, Aug. 9. She was 56.

Wojcicki’s death after a two-year fight with cancer was announced by her husband, Dennis Troper, in a public post Friday evening on Facebook.

“It is with profound sadness that I share the news of Susan Wojcicki passing. My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non-small cell lung cancer,” Troper wrote in the post. “Susan was not just my best friend and partner in life, but a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to many. Her impact on our family and the world was immeasurable. We are heartbroken, but grateful for the time we had with her. Please keep our family in your thoughts as we navigate this difficult time.”

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, in a tribute posted on X said, “Unbelievably saddened by the loss of my dear friend @SusanWojcicki after two years of living with cancer. She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her.” Pichai continued, “She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world and I’m one of countless Googlers who is better for knowing her. We will miss her dearly. Our thoughts with her family. RIP Susan.”

Wojcicki joined Google in 1999 as the 16th employee, becoming the search engine’s first marketing exec and going on to become one of the most prominent women leaders in Silicon Valley. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin initially ran the company out of her garage in Menlo Park, Calif., which Wojcicki had rented out to the duo before Google secured office space.

In 2005, Wojcicki led the launch of Google Video — and in 2006 she oversaw the internet company’s $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, a then-fledgling rival video-upload website. Among other accomplishments, she cut the company’s first deals to license search technology and led the initial development of Google’s image search.

In February 2014,Wojcicki was named YouTube’s CEO. Google’s appointment of Wojcicki, one of the company’s most senior execs, reflected how important the video platform had become to its advertising business. She stepped down as CEO of YouTube in February 2023, while remaining an adviser to the company. In a memo to staff at the time, Wojcicki said she was exiting as head of YouTube to “start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about.”

As head of YouTube, Wojcicki pushed to build out the platform’s expansion onto internet-connected TVs, angling to win a bigger share of ad dollars from traditional television networks. “At a time when TV is losing audiences, YouTube is growing in every region, on every screen,” she said in 2016 at YouTube’s Brandcast event for marketers. Wojcicki also was forced to reckon with an advertiser boycott the following year in response to ads on YouTube that ran with objectionable content, including terrorism and hate-speech videos, which prompted the platform to implement stricter brand-safety policies.

Under Wojcicki’s leadership, Google launched YouTube TV, which had more than 8 million customers as of early 2024 and the U.S.’s biggest streaming pay-TV service, stealing share from traditional cable and satellite operators. In late 2022, the company scored a seven-year, multibillion-dollar deal with the NFL to making YouTube the exclusive U.S. retailer of the Sunday Ticket out-of-market games package. In 2015, the platform debuted a Netflix-style streaming service, called YouTube Red, stocked with original shows and movies — but that didn’t pan out, and YouTube eventually shut down its original programming initiative.

Wojcicki was a vocal advocate for employers to offer generous family benefits, particularly paid maternity leave. In 2015, she was named a Variety Power of Women honoree, highlighting her literacy charity Room to Read. “At YouTube, it’s been an opportunity for me to be able to help other women,” she told Variety at the time. “I see the potential that women have. And I enjoy being a mentor, figuring the best way for them to balance work with family.”

Neal Mohan, who succeeded Wojcicki as YouTube CEO, said he’d had “the good fortune of meeting Susan 17 years ago when when she was the architect of the DoubleClick acquisition,” the ad-tech company where he had been an executive. “Her legacy lives on in everything she touched @google and @youtube,” Mohan wrote on X. “I am forever grateful for her friendship and guidance. I will miss her tremendously. My heart goes out to her family and loved ones.”

In her multiple roles at Google,Wojcicki had overseen product management of AdSense, Google Book Search and Google Video as well as the syndication of the company’s products.Prior to Google, she worked at Intel, Bain & Co. and R.B. Webber & Co.

Wojcicki was born on July 5, 1968, in Santa Clara, Calif. Her father, Stanley Wojcicki, was a physics professor at Stanford and her mother, Esther Wojcicki, was a teacher. She graduated from Harvard in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in history and literature before earning a master’s in economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993. She received an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 1998. Wojcicki married Troper, who currently works at Google as a director of product management, on Aug. 23, 1998.