Tragedy has once more struck a well-known Silicon Valley household. Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has handed away, in line with social media posts by her husband, Dennis Troper, and by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. She was 56.
Wrote Troper on Fb earlier Friday evening, “It’s with profound disappointment that I share the information of Susan Wojcicki passing. My beloved spouse of 26 years and mom to our 5 youngsters left us right now after 2 years of dwelling with non-small cell lung most cancers.”
“Susan was not simply my finest pal and companion in life, however an excellent thoughts, a loving mom, and a pricey pal to many. Her influence on our household and the world was immeasurable. We’re heartbroken, however grateful for the time we had along with her. Please hold our household in your ideas as we navigate this tough time.”
Wojcicki and Troper had suffered a heart-breaking loss in February of this yr when their 19-year-old son, Marco Troper, died of an unintentional overdose in his dorm room on the College of California, Berkeley, the place he was a freshman.
Wojcicki rose to fame because the CEO of YouTube, a job she held for 9 years earlier than stepping down in early 2023, saying in a weblog put up on the time that she had “determined to begin a brand new chapter centered on my household, well being and private tasks I’m enthusiastic about.”
Wojcicki was among the many first 20 workers of Google, which went on to amass YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion — what appeared like an astronomical quantity on the time. She famously grew to become concerned with the corporate after renting the storage of her Menlo Park, Calif., house to buddies Larry Web page and Sergey Brin, who have been Ph.D. college students at Stanford on the time. (Google was restructured in 2015, at which level Alphabet grew to become its father or mother firm.)
Based on studies through the years, it was after observing the early traction of YouTube that Wojcicki herself — then a advertising supervisor at Google — proposed to Web page and Brin that Google purchase the video streaming platform.
Below her management, YouTube grew to become a multibillion greenback money generator for Google. In 2023, YouTube posted $8.1 billion in income by means of advert gross sales — almost 10% of Alphabet’s whole income.
Wojcicki’s household has deep ties to Silicon Valley and to the Bay Space extra broadly. Considered one of her sisters is 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki. One other sister, Janet, is a professor of pediatrics on the College of California, San Francisco. In the meantime, their mom Esther Wojcicki, is a famend educator who has written extensively on learn how to increase profitable youngsters.