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This legendary female CEO once created a Silicon Valley myth - helping Google transform from a startup company into a global Internet giant.

She is Susan Wojcicki, one of the "founders of Google".

As we all know, the two founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, started their entrepreneurial journey in a friend's garage.

What few people know is that this garage is Susan’s home garage – Menlo-Park Garage.

Her husband Dennis Troper posted on social media that Susan left us today after a two-year battle with lung cancer.

She is not only an outstanding female executive in Silicon Valley and a mother of five children, but also her life partner, beloved, and best friend of 26 years.

It is with deep sadness that I share the news of Susan Wojcicki's passing. My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children passed away today after a two-year battle with lung cancer. Susan was not only my best friend and life partner, she was also a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a friend to many. Her impact on our family and the world is immeasurable. We are heartbroken but grateful for the time we had with her.

The news of Susan's death shocked Silicon Valley.

Google CEO Pichai, chief scientist Jeff Dean, Apple CEO Cook, current YouTube CEO and other AI technology giants have posted messages to mourn.

Incredibly saddened to learn that my dear friend Susan Wojcicki has passed away after a two-year battle with cancer. She was an integral part of Google's history, and it's hard to imagine a world without her. She was an incredible person, leader, and friend who had an enormous impact on the world. I am one of countless Googlers who is better for having known her. She will be deeply missed. Our thoughts are with her family. RIP, Susan!

I am deeply saddened by the passing of Susan Wojcicki, my dear colleague and friend. She had a profound impact on everyone at Google and touched the lives of so many. My sincere condolences go out to her entire family and everyone who knew her.

Deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Susan Wojcicki. She was one of the visionaries of Silicon Valley and will be missed by many. R.I.P.

Today YouTube lost a teammate, mentor, and friend, Susan Wojcicki. I had the privilege of meeting Susan 17 years ago when she was a designer at the DoubleClick acquisition. Her legacy lives on in everything she touched – Google and YouTube. I am forever grateful for her friendship and guidance. I will miss her dearly. My heart goes out to her family and loved ones.

How did this legendary woman influence the trajectory of Google?

The year 1998 was the era of the Internet information explosion.

Susan, 30, had just obtained an MBA from UCLA. After graduation, she chose to marry her husband Dennis Troper, whom she had been dating for many years while in school.

After getting married, they bought a new house in Menlo Park, California for $615,000. In order to ease the pressure of the mortgage, they decided to rent the garage.

Coincidentally, two unknown young CS graduate students at Stanford, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, decided to give up their studies and give it a try to build a search engine.

At the time, Susan rented them the garage (and several rooms) for $1,700 a month.

That was the "garage era" of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The two founders and employee No. 1 Craig Silverstein sat in a room full of servers and routers writing code, with a bathtub in the backyard outside the window.

They sometimes had pizza and chocolate together in the evenings and talked about how this technology would change the world, collecting information from the entire Internet and making it searchable.

Susan once said that the origin of Google's food culture came from the day she and her husband ordered a refrigerator for the kitchen.

The company's residential beginnings led to its famous employee well-being culture, where having showers, food readily available, and washers and dryers were really important.

A year later, Google hired 15 employees and moved out of the garage, renting an office above a bicycle shop in Palo Alto.

At this time, Susan decided to join the company as the 16th employee and was called the "Mother of Google."

At that time, Google was just a little-known company with very little revenue. Why did Susan quit her job at Intel and join Google?

In an interview with Forbes many years later, she recalled: "When I started using Google in 1998, I realized the impact it would have, and the company was just getting started."

“One day, I lost access to their services and found myself unable to get my work done. I realized that Google helps people around the world find the information they need.”

YouTube

In 2002, Susan took over Google's advertising division, ultimately leading a multi-billion dollar business that transformed an entire industry.

During her tenure, she facilitated two of Google's most important acquisitions.

In 2006, Google officially acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion.

At the time, YouTube was still a fledgling site for uploading homemade videos, but it was already more famous than Google's own products.

Then a year later, she pushed through the acquisition of DoubleClick, which oversees the most popular ad network for large Web publishers.

These two acquisitions evolved into Google's largest and most important departments, helping Google diversify its business and move away from its cash cow search engine business.

In 2014, she officially took over YouTube and became CEO, and was hailed as the most powerful woman in the advertising industry.

At YouTube, she launched new advertising formats and subscription services for music, original content, and YouTube TV.

During her tenure, YouTube became the most popular video service on the internet, with a major focus on controlling hate speech, inappropriate content, extremism and misinformation.

In 2019, she told the NYT in an interview, "My legacy at YouTube will depend on whether YouTube succeeds in content restriction, which is something the company has been struggling with."

In 2023, due to health reasons, Susan publicly resigned and sent a letter to all employees saying that she decided to focus on family, health, and personal projects.

But she remains an advisor to Google's parent company, Alphabet.

An underrated veteran

An author from technology media Wired said that Susan's contribution to Google's success has been underestimated since its inception.

During Susan's tenure as CEO, YouTube became increasingly important to Google and parent company Alphabet's business.

Not only has the number of users increased by 1 billion and established a leading position in the short video field, YouTube's advertising sales of more than $32 billion also account for more than 10% of Alphabet's total revenue.

Prior to joining YouTube, she was a key leader in Google's advertising products for nearly a decade, responsible for design and engineering of all advertising products including AdWords, AdSense, and DoubleClick.

As senior vice president of the advertising department, few Google employees understand the online advertising business as well as she does, and she is deeply involved in Google's transformation in its advertising business.

Today, advertising revenue is the absolute mainstay of Google. In 2023, this proportion is 77.8%.

However, search engines rely on advertising for profit, which was not a business model from the beginning. Even in the early days of Google, how to establish a mature and sustainable profit model for search engines was a problem.

Susan has been actively guiding Google towards profitability since its early days, which may be closely related to her educational background of a master's degree in economics and an MBA.

In 2008, before Eric Schmidt became CEO, she was keenly aware of the importance of advertising revenue:

“There’s a shift happening where we realize we can make more money from advertising rather than selling search content to publishers.”

Moreover, Google's initial advertising business model was called "pay-per-impression", which means charging based on the number of displays, and later it was changed to charging based on the number of user clicks.

This shift in advertising model is revolutionary. The entire industry no longer vaguely estimates the effectiveness of advertising, but instead shifts to an approach based on accurate measurement.

AdSense, which Susan created, further expanded the scope of Google's advertising business, allowing the company to place advertisements on third-party websites while helping content creators earn commissions.

Among other things, Susan managed marketing, co-created the image search feature, and led Google's first video and book search.

Even the practice of "pampering employees" by a number of Silicon Valley technology companies, starting with Google, can be traced back to Susan's garage.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page appreciated the presence of a washer and dryer in the garage when they worked there. When the refrigerator Susan wanted in the kitchen was delivered, they were there just as they opened the door, so the refrigerator was installed in the garage.

This refrigerator may be connected to the first micro kitchen in Google's office.

She speculated that Google was once rooted in residential areas, so it wanted to make the workplace as comfortable as home, especially to attract a group of young people who had just graduated from college to work. Showers, washing machines, and dryers were very important.

In 2011, as Google's early veterans gradually left, a reporter from Wired magazine asked Susan: You have already made a lot of money from your early shares, why do you continue to work at Google?

She gave this answer:

“Google is fascinating, and the book is not finished yet. I’m creating, living, building, and writing the chapters.”

Susan's outstanding achievements throughout her life are inseparable from the influence of a good family atmosphere.

Susan was born in Santa Clara, California in July 1968.

Parents are highly educated

Her father was Stanley Wojcicki, a famous professor of experimental particle physics at Stanford who passed away in June 23 and was known as an "experimental high-energy physicist."

In the 1960s, he was involved in the explosive development of the field, discovering many new particles and establishing the structure of the Standard Model of elementary particles.

In addition, Stanley played a key role in modern neutrino oscillation experiments using high-energy beams.

Her mother, Esther Wojcicki, was a journalist and later a teacher, but is better known as the "Godmother of Silicon Valley."

They had three girls, Susan was the eldest, Janet was born in 1970, and Anne was born in 1973.

Father Stanley plays an important role in the children's growth.

In his spare time, Stanley plays soccer with his children and coaches their AYSO soccer team. He has spent countless happy hours with his three daughters on the Stanford campus.

Stanley also took each of his daughters on special trips: hiking in Hawaii with Susan, Brazil with Janet, and Poland with Anne.

He also teaches his kids the importance of independent thinking, not being afraid to speak up, and sticking with a project no matter how difficult it gets.

When Susan is asked in an interview, "Who inspires you in real life?", she answers without hesitation, "My parents."

My sister is also the ex-wife of the founder of Google

We have already heard about Susan's personal legend.

Her two younger sisters, Janet and Anne, were equally accomplished.

Janet Wojcicki is an epidemiologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.

Anne Wojcicki is the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe and the ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin.

23andMe, named after the number of chromosomes in a human body, is a pioneer in the field by creating the first FDA-authorized, consumer-facing DNA test.

23andMe's genetic testing kit was named "Invention of the Year" by Time magazine in 2008. It can provide early warning of certain cancers, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, cystic fibrosis risks, etc. through genes.

In 2007, Anne married Google co-founder Sergey Brin and had a son and a daughter, but they divorced in 2015.

Both Susan and Anne have been shortlisted for Forbes magazine's "100 Most Powerful Women in the World".

Personal early life

Throughout her career, Susan has created personal wealth estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars.

Susan was also a philanthropist, providing support for the disease that took her life.

In 1990, Susan graduated from Harvard College with a major in history and literature.

In a later interview, she revealed that she had originally planned to obtain a postdoctoral degree in economics and become a scholar, but her discovery of the potential of technology changed her future life path.

In 1993, she received a master's degree in economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and in 1998 she received an MBA from UCLA.

This is the story we mentioned earlier.

Her husband Dennis Troper was a financial consultant at Deloitte and joined Google in 2003 as a product manager.

When Susan joined Google in 1999, she was four months pregnant.

By then, Google had moved from her garage to a more traditional office space.

In 2014, she wrote an article in WSJ to promote Google's paid system, saying, "Paid parental leave has become a standard not only for Google, but also for other companies."

During her lifetime, she and her husband Troper had five children.

Sadly, in February of this year, one of Susan's five children, Marco Troper, passed away.

A freshman studying mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, he was found unconscious in his dormitory room. Even though first aid measures were taken immediately, they were ineffective and he was pronounced dead on the spot.

Marco's grandmother, Esther Wojcicki, known as the "Godmother of Silicon Valley," believes he may have died of a drug overdose: "He took a drug, but we don't know what was in it... We do know that it was a drug."

But she adored her grandson, describing him in a Facebook post as "the kindest, most loving, smartest, funniest, most beautiful person."

According to the official investigation report, Marco's grandmother's guess should be correct, and his cause of death was confirmed to be "acute combined drug poisoning."

The report showed that Marco had high levels of alprazolam, an anti-anxiety drug also known as Xanax, as well as cocaine, amphetamines and hydroxyzine, which is sometimes used to treat depression.

Among them, the concentration of alprazolam and cocaine has reached a lethal dose. In addition, a large number of suspected illegal drugs and prescription drugs were also found at the scene.

Both cocaine and alprazolam are among the top drug abusers among young Americans, according to research released by the University of Cambridge. And the chronic stress caused by the COVID pandemic appears to have exacerbated the rate of prescriptions for psychiatric drugs.

Google CEO Pichai published a long article expressing his deep condolences for Susan.

https://www.wired.com/story/susan-wojcicki-former-youtube-ceo-dies-at-56/