Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube and longtime Google executive, died Saturday at the age of 56, after a two-year battle with lung cancer.
“It is with deep sadness that I announce the passing of Susan Wojcicki,” Wojcicki’s husband, Dennis Tropper, said in a statement. “My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us today after two years of living with lung cancer.” Facebook share
“Over the past two years, even as she dealt with great personal hardship, Susan devoted herself to making the world a better place through her philanthropy, including supporting research into the disease that ultimately took her life,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post.
Wojcicki, one of the most prominent women in technology, joined Google in 1999, becoming one of the first employees at the internet search leader, years before it acquired YouTube. Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion (around €1.52 billion).
Before becoming CEO of YouTube in 2014, Wojcicki was senior vice president of advertising products at Google.
After nine years at the helm of the company, Wojcicki will step down from YouTube in 2023 to focus on “family, health and personal projects.”
Wojcicki FWojcicki was replaced by her deputy, Neal Mohan, a senior advertising and product executive who joined Google in 2008. At the time, Wojcicki planned to take an advisory role at Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
“25 years ago, I made the decision to join two Stanford graduate students who were building a new search engine. Their names were Larry and Sergey… It would be one of the best decisions of my life,” Wojcicki wrote in a blog post, the day he left YouTube, referring to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
