5 Facts About Former Google CEO Susan Wojcicki You Should Know

Pioneering tech executive Susan Wojcicki helped shape Google and YouTube and was one of the most respected executives in the tech industry. She influenced the careers of many women in tech, including former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who shared on Instagram that Susan was the person she’d regularly turn to for advice when she started her own career in tech.

With the recent news of Susan’s death at age 56 from lung cancer, world leaders have reflected on the impact of her legacy, which has been felt far and wide. We’ve pulled together five facts you should know about her and her work:

She was instrumental in helping Google get off the ground, as she rented her garage to founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as they worked on developing the company, now known as Alphabet, according to ABC News. She started working as their marketing manager in 1999 and grew with the company, eventually serving as Google’s senior vice president of advertising and commerce and later as CEO of YouTube, which she was instrumental in helping Google acquire in 2006, according to NPR.

During her time at YouTube, the platform became the internet’s most popular video service, according to the New York Times.

Throughout her career, she was an advocate for women and equality in the workplace. She was the first to take parent leave at Google and advocated for establishing parental leave policies in the workplace, according to NPR.

In 2018, she implemented an 18-week paid maternity leave policy at Google, which was unheard of at the time. The policy resulted in a 50% reduction in new mothers leaving the company, according to AnitaB.org.

After facing public criticism over how YouTube handled content moderation, misinformation and privacy concerns, she spearheaded efforts at the company to improve content moderation and create a more inclusive platform, according to the BBC.

In 2016, she spoke at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit about how YouTube would become the future of TV as new generations of consumers changed how they consumed video content, further highlighting the need for most consistent content moderation.

Beyond her career in tech, she was well-known for a rousing speech she gave at Johns Hopkins’ 2014 graduation ceremony, telling graduates good opportunities would likely be messy and hard to recognize.

In her speech, she shared her experience of working to launch Google Video at the same time that YouTube was taking off, and the decision to tell the founders that they’d made a mistake pursuing a video hosting platform and it would cost them $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube and fix that mistake.

Before her career in tech, she was a photographer for the Harvard University student newspaper the Harvard Crimson. She continued to support the newspapers for decades after graduating, most recently donation $1 million to support the student newspaper, according to the Crimson.

Over the years, she and her husband provided scholarships to University of California Santa Cruz and created the Troper Wojcicki Foundation, which supports cancer research, efforts to tackle climate change and work that advances human rights.

Her philanthropy continued in 2023, when she and her husband singed the Giving Pledge, a public commitment created by Bill Gates where billionaires promise to give away the majority of their wealth during their lifetime or in their will, according to MarketWatch.