Remembering Susan Wojcicki
August 11, 2024 at 1:34 p.m. EDT
The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/11/wojcicki-google-youtube-tech/
In 2015, the year after she became CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki and I talked onstage at a business conference in Aspen, Colo. She told me beforehand that she could track her career at Google with the birth of each of her five children. It seemed that every time she became pregnant, she explained, she found herself in a new role at the company.
Noting the size of her family and the arc of her career, I asked her to describe each phase. She was pregnant with her eldest, she said, when she joined Google in 1999. The second corresponded with her role in helping build Google’s advertising business, the third with its acquisition of YouTube and the fourth with its purchase of DoubleClick, an advertising technology company. She became CEO of YouTube, her fifth and final career change at Google, following the birth of her youngest child. “Each baby,” she said, “brings a good era of opportunity.”
Wojcicki’s death Friday from lung cancer at age 56 marks the end of an era for Google and Silicon Valley. It cuts tragically short the life of a Silicon Valley leader who was a role model throughout her industry and a link to her powerful company’s earliest and humbler days. She was the rare tech-industry executive, even rarer as a woman in a male-dominated industry, who was universally liked. She was valued for her ability to communicate up and down the management ranks at Google, from its sometimes prickly founders to its employees, as well as with Google’s many and often contentious partners.
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