Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s Former CEO, Dies at 56

Susan Wojcicki, who helped turn Google from a start-up in her garage into an internet juggernaut, and who became one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent female executives with her leadership of YouTube, died on Friday. She was 56.

Her death was confirmed by her husband, Dennis Troper, who wrote on Facebook that she had been living with lung cancer for two years. He did not say where she died.

Ms. Wojcicki’s more than two decades with Google began in 1998 in her house in Menlo Park, Calif., part of which she rented to her friends Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s founders. For $1,700 a month, the two used the garage as their office to build the search engine.

Ms. Wojcicki, who had been working at Intel, soon joined Google as one of its earliest employees and was its first marketing manager. Over the years, she reached its executive ranks, becoming Google’s most senior woman employee. She eventually led YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006, and which became one of the world’s largest social media companies.

“She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said in a statement.

When she became YouTube’s chief executive in 2014, Ms. Wojcicki was hailed as the most powerful woman in advertising. She had made Google enormously profitable, and she was expected to repeat the trick at YouTube. She led Google’s ad business and played a key role in its acquisition of DoubleClick, an advertising technology company, in 2007.

At YouTube, she introduced new forms of advertising and subscription offerings for music, original content and YouTube TV. During her tenure, YouTube became the internet’s most popular video service, and her role shifted to control of hate speech, inappropriate content, extremism and misinformation.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2019, Ms. Wojcicki suggested that her legacy at YouTube would depend on whether it succeeded in content moderation, something the company has struggled with.

“I know we can do better, but we’re going to get there. We’ll get to a point where we have solved a lot of these issues, and I feel like we’ve already made significant progress,” she said. “I own this problem, and I’m going to fix it.”

She stepped down from her role last year, writing to YouTube employees at the time that she had decided to focus on “my family, health, and personal projects.”

But she remained an adviser to Alphabet, Google’s parent company. And she was active as a philanthropist, Mr. Pichai wrote in a letter to his staff, supporting, among other causes, research for the disease that took her life. She had built a personal fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions throughout her career.

Susan Diane Wojcicki was born on July 5, 1968, in Santa Clara, Calif. Her father, Stanley, who died last year, was a particle physicist at Stanford University. Her mother, Esther, worked as a journalist and later as a teacher.

Ms. Wojcicki was the eldest of three daughters. Her sister Janet is an epidemiologist and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. Her sister Anne was a founder of the genetics testing firm 23andMe and was once married to Mr. Brin.

As a young girl, Ms. Wojcicki said in a video in 2015, she was curious, hard-working and ready to try “all kinds of new things and new extracurriculars.” At Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto, she worked on the school newspaper, The Oracle, her mother said in an interview with Fortune in 2012.

Ms. Wojcicki studied history and literature at Harvard University, where she graduated in 1990. She had initially planned to get a Ph.D. in economics and become an academic, but her discovery of technology’s potential changed her path, she said in an interview with Fast Company in 2014.

She received a master’s degree in economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1993 and a master’s degree in business from the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1998.

That year, she married Mr. Troper, who was a financial consultant at Deloitte in San Francisco while she was working in marketing at Intel in Santa Clara, according to Palo Alto Weekly. In 2003 he would join Google, where he is currently employed, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Ms. Wojcicki was four months pregnant with the couple’s first child in 1999 when she joined Google; by then, the company had left her garage for more conventional office space. She campaigned for paid parental leave to become standard not only at Google but at other businesses, promoting the policy in an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal in 2014. She and Mr. Troper had five children.

In February, Ms. Wojcicki’s son Marco, 19, a freshman at Berkeley, died, his grandmother Esther Wojcicki announced on social media at the time. The San Francisco Chronicle, citing the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, reported that the cause was ruled a drug overdose.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by her other four children; her sisters, Anne and Janet Wojcicki; and her mother.

Hunter Walk, a former product manager at Google who worked closely with Ms. Wojcicki, said he admired her ability to be a “translator” in navigating the many “islands, personalities and different incentives” at Google as it ballooned from a small start-up to a sprawling corporation.

“You had to convince her first, but if she believed in you and your idea, she could help translate it for Larry and Sergey,” Mr. Walk said in an email. “That was the most powerful advocacy a product leader could have on their side.”

“She was the tip of all our spears, so to speak,” he added. “A very kind, very smart and very normal spear.”