Susan Wojcicki | |
---|---|
Born | Susan Diane Wojcicki July 5, 1968 Santa Clara, California, U.S. |
Died | August 9, 2024 56) | (aged
Citizenship |
|
Education | |
Occupations |
|
Title | CEO of YouTube (2014–2023) |
Predecessor | Salar Kamangar |
Successor | Neal Mohan |
Board member of | |
Spouse | Dennis Troper (m. 1998) |
Children | 5 |
Parents |
|
Relatives |
|
Signature | |
Susan Diane Wojcicki ( /wuːˈtʃɪtski/ woo-CHITS-kee; [1] July 5, 1968 – August 9, 2024) was an American business executive who was the chief executive officer of YouTube from 2014 to 2023. Her net worth was estimated at $765 million in 2022. [2]
Wojcicki worked in the technology industry for over twenty years. [3] [4] She became involved in the creation of Google in 1998 when she rented out her garage as an office to the company's founders. [5] She worked as Google's first marketing manager in 1999, leading the company's online advertising business and original video service. After observing the success of YouTube, she suggested that Google should buy it; the deal was approved for $1.65 billion in 2006. She was appointed CEO of YouTube in 2014, serving until resigning in February 2023. [6]
Susan Diane Wojcicki was born in Santa Clara, California, on July 5, 1968, the daughter of Esther Wojcicki, an American journalist, and Stanley Wojcicki, a Polish physics professor at Stanford University. [7] [8] [9] Her maternal grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants. [10] Her paternal grandfather, Franciszek Wójcicki, was a Polish politician who was elected MP during the 1947 Polish legislative election. [11] Her paternal grandmother, Janina Wójcicka Hoskins, was a Polish-American librarian at the Library of Congress and was responsible for building the largest collection of Polish material in the U.S. [12] She had two sisters: Janet, a doctor of anthropology and epidemiology, [13] and Anne, an entrepreneur who is the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe. [14] [15]
Wojcicki grew up on the Stanford campus, where mathematical scientist George Dantzig was her neighbor. [16] She attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, and wrote for the school newspaper. [17] Her first business was selling "spice ropes" door-to-door at the age of eleven. A humanities major in college, she took her first computer science class as a senior. [18] She studied history and literature at Harvard University and graduated with honors in 1990. She originally planned on getting a PhD in economics and pursuing a career in academia but changed her plans when she discovered an interest in technology. [16] She also received her MS in economics in 1993 from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MBA in 1998 from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. [19]
Before becoming Google's first marketing manager in 1999, Wojcicki worked in marketing at Intel Corporation in Santa Clara, California, [16] and was a management consultant at Bain & Company and at R.B. Webber & Company. [20]
Wojcicki was Google employee #16. In September 1998, the same month that Google was incorporated, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up the Google office in Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, California. [21] Wojcicki was introduced to the pair through a mutual friend around the time she was newly married and struggling to afford the mortgage on her recent house purchase. [22] Page and Brin would use Wojcicki's garage as their office for $1,700 a month. [7] They later converted three small ground-floor bedrooms into additional workspaces to accommodate their growing team. [22] At Google, she worked on the initial viral marketing programs, helped create the company's longtime logo with designer Ruth Kedar, and spearheaded the first Google Doodles. [23] [24] She also co-developed and launched Google Image Search with engineer Huican Zhu.
In 2003, Wojcicki was the first product manager of one of Google's seminal advertising products—AdSense. [25] She earned the Google Founders' Award in recognition for this work. [26] Wojcicki was subsequently promoted to Google's senior vice president of Advertising & Commerce, and oversaw the company's advertising and analytic products, including AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Analytics. [19] [27]
YouTube, then a small start-up, was successfully competing with Google's Google Video service, overseen by Wojcicki. She had recommended and subsequently managed the $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube in 2006. [19]
In February 2014, Wojcicki became the CEO of YouTube. [28] [29] She was named "the most important person in advertising", [30] as well as named one of Time's 100 most influential people in 2015 [31] and described in a later issue of Time as "the most powerful woman on the Internet." [32] In December 2014, she had joined the board of Salesforce. [33] She also served on the board of Room to Read, [34] an organization that focuses on literacy and gender equality in education, and was a board member of UCLA Anderson School of Management. [35]
After Wojcicki became the CEO of YouTube, the company reached 2 billion logged-in users a month [36] and users were watching one billion hours of content a day. [37] [38] By 2021, YouTube had paid more than $30 billion to creators, artists, and media companies. [39] There are localized versions of YouTube in 100 countries around the world across 80 languages. From her appointment as CEO up to August 2017, YouTube's percentage of female employees rose from 24 to nearly 30 percent. [40] Wojcicki also emphasized new YouTube applications and experiences designed to cater to users interested in family [41] gaming, [42] and music [43] content. While CEO, the company developed 10 forms of monetization for YouTube creators, including channel memberships, merchandise, BrandConnect, and paid digital goods like Super Chat. [44] She also launched YouTube's advertisement-free subscription service, YouTube Premium (formerly known as YouTube Red), [45] and its over-the-top (OTT) internet television service YouTube TV. [46] In 2020, the company launched YouTube Shorts, its short-form video experience, [47] which surpassed 50 billion daily views in February 2023. [48] In November 2022, YouTube publicized that the company had surpassed 80 million Music and Premium subscribers, including trailers. [49] The company also reported over 100 billion hours of global gaming content watched on the platform in 2020. [50]
Wojcicki tightened YouTube's policy on videos it regards as potentially violating its policies on hate speech and violent extremism. [51] The more stringent policies came after The Times showed that "ads sponsored by the British government and several private sector companies had appeared ahead of YouTube videos supporting terrorist groups" and several large advertisers withdrew their ads from YouTube in response. [52] The enforcement policies have been criticized as censorship. [53] YouTube has also faced criticism that the company applies its enforcement policies inconsistently, with larger content creators treated more favorably. During the controversy surrounding Logan Paul's YouTube video about a person who died of suicide, Wojcicki said that Paul did not violate YouTube's three-strike policy, and therefore did not meet the criteria for being banned from the platform. [54]
Wojcicki has emphasized educational content as a priority for the company, and on July 20, 2018, announced the initiative YouTube Learning, which invests in grants and promotion to support education focused creator content. [55]
On October 22, 2018, Wojcicki wrote that Article 13, as written in the European Union Copyright Directive, would make YouTube directly liable for copyrighted content, and poses a threat to content creators' ability to share their work. [56]
On February 16, 2023, Wojcicki announced her resignation from YouTube via a company blog post. She said she wanted to focus on "family, health, and personal projects" but would be taking on an advisory role across Google and its parent company Alphabet. [6] [57]
Wojcicki was an advocate for several causes, including the expansion of paid family leave, [58] the plight of Syrian refugees, [59] countering gender discrimination at technology companies, [40] [60] getting young girls interested in computer science, and prioritizing computer programming and coding in schools. [61] She also owned a real estate holding company that worked on the sustainable growth of Los Altos, California. [62] Wojcicki endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. [63]
Wojcicki married Dennis Troper, a director of product management at Google, in Belmont, California, on August 23, 1998. [64] They had five children. [65] On December 16, 2014, ahead of taking her fifth maternity leave, she wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal about the importance of paid maternity leave. [58] She was often quoted talking about the importance of finding the balance between family and career.
In addition to her American citizenship, [65] Wojcicki held Polish citizenship through her father. [66] [58] [67]
On February 13, 2024, Wojcicki's son Marco Troper, a 19-year-old student at the University of California, Berkeley, [68] [69] died of acute combined drug toxicity. [70]
Wojcicki died on August 9, 2024, at the age of 56, after living with non-small-cell lung cancer for two years. [71] [72] [73] [74]
In November 2024, three months after her death, a final message prepared by Wojcicki was publicly released where she reflected on her career, highlighting the significance of creativity, collaboration, and adhering to core values in leadership. [75] [76]
Lawrence Edward Page is an American businessman, computer engineer and computer scientist best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Sergey Mikhailovich Brin is an American computer scientist and businessman who co-founded Google with Larry Page. He was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role on December 3, 2019. He and Page remain at Alphabet as co-founders, controlling shareholders and board members. As of December 2024, Brin is the 7th-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $164 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes.
Yahoo is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Management and 10% by Verizon.
Eric Emerson Schmidt is an American businessman and former computer engineer who was the chief executive officer of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015. He also was the executive chairman of parent company Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and technical advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020. December 2024, he was 45th richest according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index with an estimated net worth of US$37.8 billion.
Google LLC is an American-based multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" and is one of the world's most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and technological advantages in the field of AI. Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., is one of the five Big Tech companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States, it is the second-most visited website in the world, after Google Search. In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of videos every day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and as of 2023, there were approximately 14 billion videos in total.
Google was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search, which has become the most used web-based search engine. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm first (1996) known as "BackRub", with the help of Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg. The search engine soon proved successful, and the expanding company moved several times, finally settling at Mountain View in 2003. This marked a phase of rapid growth, with the company making its initial public offering in 2004 and quickly becoming one of the world's largest media companies. The company launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008, and the social network known as Google+ in 2011, in addition to many other products. In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc.
Marissa Ann Mayer is an American business executive and investor who served as president and chief executive officer of Yahoo! from 2012 to 2017. She was a long-time executive, usability leader and key spokesperson for Google. Mayer later co-founded Sunshine, a startup technology company.
Vimeo, Inc. is an American video hosting, sharing, and services provider headquartered in New York City. Vimeo focuses on the delivery of high-definition video across a range of devices. Vimeo's business model is through software as a service (SaaS). They derive revenue by providing subscription plans for businesses and content creators. Vimeo provides its subscribers with tools for video creation, editing, and broadcasting, enterprise software solutions, as well as the means for video professionals to connect with clients and other professionals. As of December 2021, the site has 260 million users, with around 1.6 million subscribers to its services.
Criticism of Google includes concern for tax avoidance, misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of others' intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate people's privacy and collaboration with the US military on Google Earth to spy on users, censorship of search results and content, its cooperation with the Israeli military on Project Nimbus targeting Palestinians and the energy consumption of its servers as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as monopoly, restraint of trade, antitrust, patent infringement, indexing and presenting false information and propaganda in search results, and being an "Ideological Echo Chamber".
23andMe Holding Co. is an American personal genomics and biotechnology company based in South San Francisco, California. It is best known for providing a direct-to-consumer genetic testing service in which customers provide a saliva sample that is laboratory analysed, using single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping, to generate reports relating to the customer's ancestry and genetic predispositions to health-related topics. The company's name is derived from the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a diploid human cell.
Anne E. Wojcicki is an American entrepreneur who co-founded and is CEO of the personal genomics company 23andMe. She founded the company in 2006 with Linda Avey and Paul Cusenza. She is a co-founder and board member of the Breakthrough Prize.
YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California, founded by three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion, since which it operates as one of Google's subsidiaries.
Esther Denise "Woj" Hochman Wojcicki is an American journalist, educator, and vice chair of the Creative Commons advisory council. Wojcicki has studied education and technology. She is the founder of the Palo Alto High School Media Arts Program in Palo Alto, California.
Salar Kamangar is an Iranian-American senior executive at Google and former CEO of Google's YouTube brand.
Stanley George Wojcicki was a Polish-American physicist and former chair of the physics department at Stanford University in California.
Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Alphabet is the world's second-largest technology company by revenue, after Apple, and one of the world's most valuable companies. It was created through a restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and became the parent holding company of Google and several former Google subsidiaries. It is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
Neal Mohan is an American business executive who is the current chief executive officer of YouTube.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)