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Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has died at the age of 56 after a two-year battle with lung cancer. File photo: ERIC GAILLARD/REUTERS
Bengaluru — YouTube’s former CEO and long-time Google executive Susan Wojcicki died on Saturday at the age of 56 after a two-year battle with lung cancer.
“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 two years of living with non-small cell lung cancer,” Dennis Troper, Wojcicki’s husband, said in a Facebook post.
“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,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post.
One of the most prominent women in tech, Wojcicki joined Google in 1999 to become one of the first few employees of the web search leader, years before it acquired YouTube.
Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65bn.
Before becoming CEO of YouTube in 2014, Wojcicki was senior vice-president for ad products at Google.
After nine years at the helm, Wojcicki stepped down from her role at YouTube in 2023 to focus on “family, health, and personal projects”. She was replaced by her deputy, Neal Mohan, a senior advertising and product executive who joined Google in 2008. Wojcicki at that time planned to take on an advisory role at Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
“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 ... It would be one of the best decisions of my life,” Wojcicki wrote in a blog post on the day she left YouTube, referring to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
“Today we at YouTube lost a teammate, mentor, and friend, Susan Wojcicki,” Mohan said in a post on X.
Support our award-winning journalism. The Premium package (digital only) is R30 for the first month and thereafter you pay R129 p/m now ad-free for all subscribers.
Former YouTube CEO dies at 56
Bengaluru — YouTube’s former CEO and long-time Google executive Susan Wojcicki died on Saturday at the age of 56 after a two-year battle with lung cancer.
“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 two years of living with non-small cell lung cancer,” Dennis Troper, Wojcicki’s husband, said in a Facebook post.
“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,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post.
One of the most prominent women in tech, Wojcicki joined Google in 1999 to become one of the first few employees of the web search leader, years before it acquired YouTube.
Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65bn.
Before becoming CEO of YouTube in 2014, Wojcicki was senior vice-president for ad products at Google.
After nine years at the helm, Wojcicki stepped down from her role at YouTube in 2023 to focus on “family, health, and personal projects”. She was replaced by her deputy, Neal Mohan, a senior advertising and product executive who joined Google in 2008. Wojcicki at that time planned to take on an advisory role at Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
“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 ... It would be one of the best decisions of my life,” Wojcicki wrote in a blog post on the day she left YouTube, referring to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
“Today we at YouTube lost a teammate, mentor, and friend, Susan Wojcicki,” Mohan said in a post on X.
Reuters
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