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On August 9th local time, Susan Wojcicki, former Google executive and former CEO of YouTube, died of lung cancer at the age of 56.

Most people know Wojcicki as the key figure who led Google from a startup that only spent money but did not make money to the world's second largest company. Since joining Google in 1999 when it had only 15 employees, Wojcicki has accompanied Google's growth from a garage startup to the largest technology company in the United States, and her most outstanding contribution is "making money." 87% of Google's profits are generated by the department she manages, so she is also known as the "Google Goddess of Wealth."

With her brilliant career achievements, Wojcicki has been continuously selected as one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine and one of the most influential women on the Internet by Forbes, making her a veritable ceiling for business women.

After the news of her death, Google CEO Sundar Pichai published an article expressing his condolences, saying that Wojcicki was "central" to Google's history.

Google employee number 16

Susan Wojcicki was born in Palo Alto, California, USA in 1968. She graduated from Harvard University and received a Master of Science degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a Master of Business Administration degree from the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In 1998, Wojcicki completed three major events in her life: getting an MBA, buying a house, and getting married. In order to ease the pressure of the mortgage, she planned to rent out the garage and several rooms.

After some selection, she decided to rent the garage to two Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google in the Wojcicki family garage.

At the time, Wojcicki was a senior marketing executive at Intel and a management consultant at Bain & Company. At the height of her career, Wojcicki initially disliked Google, which was founded by two tenants, until one day in 1999, when Google's servers crashed. She was surprised to find that she was so dependent on Google.

So, she, who was four months pregnant at the time, resolutely jumped from Intel to her own garage and joined Google, which had only 15 employees.

In this way, she became Google's first female employee, the first marketing staff, employee number 16.

Wojcicki was then appointed the company's first marketing manager and was tasked with leading Google's marketing efforts with a very low budget. After taking office, her great idea was to spread Google's search engine throughout the entire network to stimulate word-of-mouth communication. She took the initiative to contact various companies, authorizing them to use Google search on their websites, and provided Google search to universities for free.

At this point, Wojcicki fired the first shot at Google.

The first person to take maternity leave

If renting a garage to the founder of Google was a blessing, then the joining of Wolski was even more of a blessing for Google.

As a female employee, after joining Google, a series of actions taken by Voskey helped Google grow rapidly from a small workshop to a global Internet giant. And every major leap forward in Google's business is closely related to the timing of her pregnancy and childbirth. Even each of her pregnancies can be seen as a milestone in the history of Google's development.

When she was pregnant with her first child, she switched to Google and helped to increase its visibility.

When she was pregnant with her second child, she took up the responsibility of Google's profit-making business - advertising.

Advertising was Google's most important source of revenue at the time. But at that time, web pages were either bombarded with ads, which provided a very poor experience, or quietly lying in the corner, and would only appear when you actively searched, which was extremely inhumane. At Wojcicki's initiative, Google launched self-service advertising AdWords. Since then, advertisers have been free to post ads, which will appear on both sides of the page based on the user's search terms, and advertisers will be charged based on clicks. In addition, Google also uses program analysis to push ad types based on user preferences, and Google's advertising business is on the right track.

Later, Wojcicki also developed a bidding ranking model, which was imitated by his peers.

Three years later, based on some of the features of AdWords, she created AdSense, a fully self-service advertising platform. As a result, advertising got rid of its original closed state, and anyone could post announcements on their own third-party websites. According to Statista, ten years later, it brought Google nearly $240 billion in advertising revenue. Wojcicki also won the Google Founder Award for this work.

After she gave birth to her third child, she acquired YouTube, the world's largest video website today.With her strong advocacy, Google completed the acquisition for US$1.65 billion in 2006. Today, the market value of YouTube has exceeded 100 billion US dollars.

Less than a year after acquiring YouTube, Wojcicki became pregnant with her fourth child. This time, she made a bigger move, spending $3.1 billion to acquire Double Click, once the largest online advertising service provider. These two acquisitions are unanimously considered to be Google's most successful acquisitions.

In 2014, when Wojcicki was 46 and pregnant with her fifth child, she had another major career event: she was named CEO of YouTube., until he steps down in February 2023.

Under her leadership, on the one hand, YouTube continued to strengthen its social attributes, differentiated content, and increased profit sharing to encourage users to continuously enhance the quality of content. On the other hand, YouTube began to make strict divisions for different online video markets, such as launching YouTube Kids, YouTube Gaming, YouTube Music, and the YouTube Red paid project.

So YouTube successfully found the "next billion users." Now, YouTube has more than 2 billion monthly active users, and users watch 1 billion hours of video every day.

Committed to breaking gender boundaries

When someone asked Wojcicki how she managed to have a successful career while raising five children, she replied: "It implies that women should stay at home to take care of children, which is actually biased." In Wojcicki's view, five children "cultivated my ability to complete multiple tasks and better prioritize things. Therefore, being a mother has helped me succeed in my career."

At the same time, she believes that a mother is often a better manager, and a good manager should learn to understand others like a mother. So she encourages more women to join the technology industry, hoping that women will break the prejudice against the technology industry and not think that only men are suitable.

To this end, she worked hard to promote benefits for women in technology companies. She set up many parking spaces for expectant mothers in Google's parking lot and personally designed Google's daycare center. She also increased the 12-week paid maternity leave to 18 weeks, and employees who were new fathers also had 12 weeks of paid paternity leave.

Since she became CEO of YouTube in 2014, the proportion of female employees at YouTube has increased from 24% to 30%.

For years, Wojcicki has been an outspoken advocate for closing the gender gap in the tech industry. “Technology is an incredible force that’s going to change our world in ways we can’t predict,” she told Forbes in 2018. “If only 20 to 30 percent of that force is women, there’s a problem.” As one of the few female CEOs of major companies, Wojcicki is considered one of the most influential women in the world.

With her extraordinary talent and firm belief, she has always been committed to breaking gender boundaries and lighting a beacon of life for countless women.

After Wojcicki's death, Google CEO Pichai said in a letter to Google employees that Susan Wojcicki "used her position to create a better workplace for everyone," including becoming the first woman to take maternity leave at Google. He wrote that "her advocacy of parental leave set a new standard for companies around the world."

Family education genes play an important role

In fact, Wojcicki's excellence has deep roots in her family.Wojcicki once said that the two people who had the greatest influence on her were her parents. Her father taught her how to analyze systematically and grasp the essence of problems, and from her mother, she learned journalism and writing, and developed the ability to think independently.

In addition to her, Wojcicki's two sisters are also very outstanding. Janet Wojcicki, the second oldest, graduated from Stanford University and is a medical anthropologist and epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. She speaks multiple African dialects and has made significant contributions to the health of African children. Anne Wojcicki, the youngest sister, graduated from the Department of Biology at Yale University and is one of the founders of the genetic technology company 23andMe. She is known as the "female version of Steve Jobs."

The success of the three sisters is inseparable from the influence of a good original family atmosphere.Their father is a famous professor of experimental particle physics at Stanford, and their mother, Izelle Woski, was a journalist and later a teacher, but she is better known as the "Godmother of Silicon Valley."

As a Chinese teacher, Iser felt that traditional Chinese education was too backward, so he started a newspaper with 19 students in 1984, allowing them to learn writing by writing news. At that time, there were no computers, so the children used traditional typewriters and wax paper to set and print by themselves.

By 2012, the first media studio (MEDIA STUDIES) for language teaching in the United States founded by Izar had 600 students and 5 instructors. The students published ten multimedia products themselves, and it had become a large multimedia group.

Over the past 30 years, as his students' works have won numerous awards, Izar himself has gone from being a controversial figure to a legendary teacher emulated across the United States.

Ezel adopted the same education method for her three daughters. All three sisters took journalism courses in high school and mastered writing. Susan and Janet both worked for the school newspaper, and Anne was not only the editor-in-chief, but also won a scholarship for writing news.

In the 1990s, the high-tech wave swept Silicon Valley, and the Wojcicki family was one of the first families in the city to buy a computer. Izel still remembers the scene of her personally teaching her children how to use Apple computers. "My idea was that if there is something you don't understand, don't just wait for the teacher to teach you, try to find the answer yourself."

In Iser's opinion, letting children have a sound personality is more important than becoming a great man.Her famous “TRICK” education method (Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, Kindness) caused a sensation across the United States. She believes that only by treating children in this way can they learn these qualities.

In the process of educating the three sisters, she never treated them as children. She believed that only by giving them responsibilities can children exceed expectations. Perhaps it is this trust that makes the three sisters independent and confident, and has achieved such outstanding achievements in traditional male fields such as medicine, biology, and technology.

Conclusion

In 2014, Wojcicki was invited to give a speech at the graduation ceremony of Johns Hopkins University. At that time, Wojcicki had just become the CEO of YouTube. She told this group of young graduates about her story at Google and shared her life experience:

1. It is very important to set achievable goals.

2. You have to make decisions without perfect information.Opportunities rarely come to you in a perfect gift box with a bow, and you open it and feel happy. On the contrary, good opportunities are messy, confusing, difficult to identify, risky, and challenging. You need to make decisions without perfect information. The opportunity that Google gave me seemed unique.

3. When you fail, admit your failure and use it to grow.The world is changing rapidly, which means no one knows the right answer and everyone is likely to fail. When we realize that things are not working and we need to change our strategy, we all have an instinctive resistance, but what we need most is to embrace it and accept it. The sooner we adjust, the sooner we will be on the right track.

4. Don’t over-plan your life.Life will not go according to your plan. You just have to be brave enough to seize the opportunity when it comes.

Although she is gone, the life of this legendary woman in Silicon Valley is always inspiring and empowering. Her light will illuminate the way forward for more people today.

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