Susan Wojcicki, longtime YouTube CEO and Google executive, dies at 56

Susan Wojcickia pioneering technology executive who helped shape Google and YouTube, died, her husband said. He was 56.

Wojcicki played a key role in the creation of Google and served nine years as CEO of YouTube, leaving last year to focus on her “family, health and personal projects that I'm passionate about,” she said at the time.

She was one of the most respected female executives in the male-dominated technology industry.

Her collaboration with the co-founders of Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin they started shortly after incorporating their search engine into a business in 1998. Wojcicki rented the garage of their Menlo Park, Calif., home for $1,700 a month, establishing a formative partnership. Page and Brin — both 25 at the time — continued to refine their search engine in Wojcicki's garage for five months before moving Google to a more formal office and later convincing their former owner to come work for their company .

Wojcicki joined Google, now known as Alphabet, as director of marketing in 1999 and served in a variety of roles as Google grew its online advertising presence by acquiring YouTube in 2006 and DoubleClick in 2008. She served as Google's senior vice president of advertising and commerce from 2011 to early 2014 and YouTube's CEO from 2014 to 2023.

“Her loss is devastating to all of us who knew and loved her, to the thousands of Googlers she led over the years, and to the millions of people around the world who looked up to her, benefited from her advocacy and leadership, and felt the impact of the incredible things he's created at Google, YouTube and beyond,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a note to employees.

Former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who was Google's vice president of sales and operations from 2001 to 2008 before landing at Facebook, said in a Facebook post that Wojcicki was formative in her tech career.

“He taught me the business and helped me navigate a growing, fairly chaotic organization early in my technology career,” Sandberg wrote. “He was the person I turned to for advice time and time again. And he was that person for many others as well.”

Her husband, Dennis Troper, announced her death in a social media post late Friday.

“My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non-small cell lung cancer,” he wrote.

“Susan was not just my best friend and partner in life, but a brilliant mind, a loving mother and a dear friend to many,” Troper said.

No other details about her death were immediately available.

Wojcicki and Troper's 19-year-old son, Marco Troper, died in February on the UC Berkeley campus where he lived as a freshman.