Susan Wojcicki(1968 — 2024)
Susan Wojcicki
États-Unis
9 min read
CEO of YouTube from 2014 to 2023, Susan Wojcicki is one of Silicon Valley's pioneers. She was Google's 16th employee, and in 1998 she rented her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin to house the company's first servers. Her leadership turned YouTube into the world's leading online video platform.
Famous Quotes
« Cherish your human connections — your relationships with friends and family. »
« If you're not making mistakes, you're not taking risks, and that means you're not going anywhere. »
Key Facts
- 1998: rents her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin for Google's early days
- 1999: joins Google as its 16th employee, develops the AdWords advertising tools
- 2006: oversees Google's acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 billion
- 2014–2023: CEO of YouTube, grows the platform to over 2 billion active users
- 2023: announces her resignation after nine years leading YouTube
Works & Achievements
As Vice President of Advertising at Google, Susan Wojcicki designed the advertising systems that would generate virtually all of Google's revenue, transforming a search engine idea into a financial machine worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Susan Wojcicki was one of the principal architects of the acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 billion — a bold decision at the time that proved to be one of the greatest technology investments in history.
Over nine years at the helm of YouTube, she grew the platform from 1 to more than 2.5 billion monthly active users, launched YouTube Premium, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids, and put content moderation policies in place to tackle misinformation.
A dedicated app for children, designed to provide a safe, filtered environment; it represents Wojcicki's effort to make YouTube compatible with the expectations of families and regulators.
YouTube's first paid subscription service, offering an ad-free experience and access to original content, reflecting her ambition to diversify the platform's revenue beyond advertising alone.
Drawing on her own experience as a mother of five, Susan Wojcicki championed and secured an extension of maternity and paternity leave at Google, making the company a benchmark for workplace equality in the tech industry.
Anecdotes
In September 1998, two young computer science students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin were looking for an office for their brand-new company. Susan Wojcicki, who was then working at Intel, rented them her garage in Menlo Park for $1,700 a month. That garage would become Google's first headquarters, and Susan would become its sixteenth employee in 1999.
In 2006, while Google was still hesitant about acquiring YouTube — a video-sharing startup founded just a year earlier — it was Susan Wojcicki who pushed management to finalize the deal for $1.65 billion. Many considered the sum astronomical for a site that was losing money; history proved her right: YouTube is today valued at several hundred billion dollars.
When she was appointed CEO of YouTube in February 2014, Susan Wojcicki was pregnant with her fifth child. She took on her new role just weeks before giving birth, embodying in herself a debate she cared deeply about: professional equality for women. She then actively campaigned for Google to extend its parental leave to eighteen weeks, a measure adopted in 2015.
In 2017, a shooting took place at YouTube's California headquarters in San Bruno, injuring several employees. Susan Wojcicki, deeply shaken, responded publicly with empathy and strengthened workplace security measures. This tragic event illustrates the social tensions that can arise around major digital platforms, particularly those linked to content moderation decisions.
After ten years leading YouTube, Susan Wojcicki announced in February 2023 that she was stepping down to focus on her family and personal projects. Less than a year and a half later, on August 9, 2024, she died of lung cancer at the age of 56. Her death prompted an outpouring of tributes across the global tech world, celebrating a woman who had redefined the way humanity consumes and shares video.
Primary Sources
Every year I write a letter to our creator community outlining my priorities for YouTube. This year, I want to focus on three areas: the creator economy, responsibility, and access.
As a mother of five daughters, the elimination of the constitutional right to abortion is deeply troubling to me. I've talked to my daughters about this ruling, explaining why it matters and how decisions made in courtrooms affect their lives.
As I look at the year ahead, I'm focused on four key priorities: creators' success, original content, living room, and responsibility. These are the areas where I believe YouTube can have the most impact.
I think about the responsibility that comes with scale. When you have billions of users, every decision you make has an enormous impact on society, on culture, on how people learn and communicate.
Key Places
It was in this garage at 232 Santa Margarita Avenue that Susan Wojcicki hosted Google's first servers in 1998, marking the birth of one of the most influential companies in history.
Google's global headquarters where Susan Wojcicki worked for fifteen years, developing Google AdSense and AdWords — the financial engines powering Google's advertising empire.
The YouTube headquarters that Susan Wojcicki led from 2014 to 2023, overseeing the platform's transformation into an indispensable force in global digital culture.
Susan Wojcicki earned her degree in history and literature here in 1990 — a formation that gave her a taste for big ideas and storytelling, qualities she would later bring to the world of digital media.
The city where Susan Wojcicki grew up, the daughter of academics — her father was a physics professor at Stanford. It was in this intellectual epicenter of the future Silicon Valley that she developed her early affinity for science and technology.