The unassuming house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, had been empty for only a couple of years when I visited in 2008, but the ghosts were still there. This was where Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google a decade previous. Here was the garage once packed with newly delivered servers and routers; there were the carpeted rooms at the back of the house where Page, Brin, and their first employee, Craig Silverstein, churned out code; out the window was the backyard with the hot tub.
In Google’s infancy the house belonged to a young couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had recently purchased it for $615,000. To help with the mortgage, the Google duo paid them $1,700 a month to rent unused space. “They entered through the garage,” Wojcicki later told me. “They weren’t allowed to enter the front door.”
Wojcicki found herself hanging out with the young founders and became fascinated by the rise of the search startup. She soon joined it herself, about the time the 15-person company moved out of her house and into an actual office, over a bicycle shop in Palo Alto. In 2002, she took over the Google advertising arm, eventually heading a multibillion-dollar business that transformed the entire industry. In 2014, she became CEO of the company’s video product YouTube, running one of the world’s biggest media properties and navigating it through competitions with other social networks and crises of content moderation. Though she was one of the most powerful women in all of business, she played it low-key, even to her departure in February 2023, “to start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about,” as she wrote in the company blog.
That same low-key ethic persisted in her difficult final years, where she privately battled non-small cell lung cancer. On Friday, Troper said that Susan Wojcicki died at 56.
In a company known for head-scratching quirks, absurd ambitions, and splashy profiles, Wojcicki somehow ducked the biggest spotlights while taking on gargantuan responsibilities. Even before Eric Schmidt became Google’s CEO and became known as the adult in the room, Wojcicki was a calm, analytical presence whose wise counsel and steady work ethic qualified her for the company’s most critical roles, even as Google, later named Alphabet, grew to one of the world’s most powerful companies. In the earliest days, her educational pedigree—including a degree at Harvard and an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA—as well as her Intel experience made her a relative veteran compared to the peach-fuzzers in charge. She was also literally a member of the family, after cofounder Brin married her sister Ann (they divorced in 2015).
Well before Schmidt’s arrival, Wojcicki was active in steering Google toward profitability. “There was a transition where we realized that we could make a lot more money from the advertising, as opposed to syndicating search on the web,” she told me in 2008, in an interview for my history of the company.
She was deeply involved in the pivot that Google made in the ad business, moving from a pay-per-impression model to one where advertisers paid only when consumers chose to click on their ads. This ad model was revolutionary, switching the whole industry to something based on measurement rather than fuzzy attempts to divine how effective ads were. She could talk endlessly on the “physics of clicks.” Wojcicki was also instrumental in starting AdSense, another groundbreaking product that allowed Google to place ads on third-party websites all over the internet. Other products she shepherded included Google Analytics, Google Books, and even the doodles that festoon the search page.
When another early Googler, Salar Kamangar, left the top role of YouTube in 2014, it already had a billion users and was one of the world’s major media properties; the predictable move would have been for CEO Larry Page to tap an experienced industry hand to take it to the next level. Instead, he was confident that Wojcicki could do the job.
“When I got to YouTube, it felt like going back in time, it felt like this is Google 2002,” she told Peter Rubin at the WIRED25 conference in 2018. “This is my opportunity to really take all these lessons that I learned at Google and … apply them to YouTube.” During her time there she added a cool billion users, built revenues to more than $32 billion a year, and established leadership in short-form video despite the emergence of rivals like TikTok. When she retired in 2023, she was still struggling with the difficulties of policing content on a massive social media platform.
Wojcicki also was well known for mentoring and coaching. Among the countless people she helped was Sheryl Sandberg, whose Google experience had been a launchpad for the COO role at Meta. “She taught me the business and helped me navigate a growing, fairly chaotic organization at the beginning of my career in tech,” Sandberg posted. Wojcicki was four months pregnant when she joined Google, and understood that she was lucky her employers granted her leave after she had her baby. A mother of five, she became a champion for family leave, not just in her own company but for all women.
What I remember about her is her groundedness. Though fabulously wealthy, she remained consistently unpretentious. (Though I do recall witnessing a conversation in which she and Wendi Murdoch considered the right number of nannies to take along on a Mediterranean vacation.) She fit right in on the Met Gala red carpet, but never came off as a glamour chaser. Family was her clear priority. Whenever I interviewed her, she was straightforward but also cannily circumspect, a true company loyalist who bled primary colors.
Wojcicki is survived by her husband, who works at Google, and four children. Her son Marco died of an overdose this past February. Also surviving are sisters Ann, cofounder of 23andMe; Janet, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco; and her mother Esther, a well-known educator who wrote a book about raising remarkable daughters. Her father Stanley, a particle physicist who taught at Stanford, died last year.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who himself was mentored by Wojcicki, wrote, “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 millions of people all over the world who looked up to her, benefited from her advocacy and leadership, and felt the impact of the incredible things she created at Google, YouTube, and beyond.”
Though Wojcicki’s career at Google/Alphabet qualifies her as one of the era’s unsung great executives, the circumstances of her original role of landlord has become the stuff of legend. Wojcicki once speculated that Google’s roots in a residential area led to the company’s famous practice of coddling employees, where the workplace offered the comforts of home. “For example, having a shower is really important,” she once told me. “When you’re attracting a really young group that’s mostly come out of college, having these services is pretty important, like having food around, or a washer and dryer.” Google’s notorious food culture, she said, started one day when she and her husband ordered the refrigerator for their kitchen. When the deliveryman came, Wojcicki had been in the shower. “Sergey and Larry answered the door and said, ‘Oh, a new refrigerator—install it here, in the garage!” she recalled. That appliance essentially became the nexus of the first Google micro-kitchen.
In 2011, I interviewed Wojcicki at the WIRED Business Conference and asked her why, despite making a fortune from her early stake in the company, she kept working there. She flipped the question back to me, asking why I wrote the Google book I’d just published. Then she spoke from the heart. “Google is fascinating,” she said, “and the book isn’t finished. I’m creating, living, building, and writing those chapters.” Her company, her family, and all of the business world will miss the chapters not written.
