Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki dies of lung cancer

Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, a tech pioneer and long-time Google executive, died on Saturday after battling lung cancer for two years.

“It is with profound sadness that I share the news of Susan Wojcicki passing. My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non small cell lung cancer,” Dennis Troper, Wojcicki’s husband, wrote in a post on Facebook.

Wojcicki was one of Google’s earliest employees, having rented out her garage to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, and she became one of the most powerful women in tech in shepherding YouTube to a premier position in online video.

Under her leadership, YouTube grew to become the platform share leader in online video.

“Over the last two years, even as she dealt with great personal difficulties, Susan devoted herself to making the world better through her philanthropy, including supporting research for the disease that ultimately took her life,” wrote Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a blog post.

Pichai also highlighted Wojcicki’s advocacy around parental leave – she was the first Google employee to take maternity leave – and her work on making YouTube a learning platform that celebrated “edutubers”.

Before taking over the helm at YouTube in 2014, Wojcicki served as the senior vice president of Ads at Google. She also co-created Google Image Search, led Google’s first Video and Book search, as well as early parts of AdSense’s creation, and worked on the acquisitions of YouTube and DoubleClick.

Wojcicki stepped down from her role at YouTube in 2023 to focus on “family, health, and personal projects.” She was succeeded by her longtime lieutenant, Neal Mohan.

“Today we at Youtube lost a teammate, mentor, and friend,” wrote Mohan in a post on X.

“Twenty-five years ago I made the decision to join a couple of Stanford graduate students who were building a new search engine. Their names were Larry and Sergey,” wrote Wojcicki in her farewell blog post, referring to the Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. “It would be one of the best decisions of my life.”