Susan Wojcickia pioneering tech executive who helped shape Google and YouTube has died, her husband said. She was 56.
Wojcicki played a key role in founding Google and was CEO of YouTube for nine years. She stepped down 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 tech sector.
[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]
Her collaboration with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin began shortly after they spun off their search engine into a company in 1998. Wojcicki rented the garage of her Menlo Park, California, home for $1,700 a month, cementing 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 landlord to come work for their company.
“Her loss is devastating for all of us who know and love her, for the thousands of Googlers she led over the years, and for 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 she created at Google, YouTube and beyond,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a letter to employees.
POPULAR STORIES:
“My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us today after living with non-small cell lung cancer for 2 years,” her husband, Dennis Troper, said in a social media post Friday night.
“Susan was not only my best friend and partner in life, but also a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to many,” Troper said.
No further details about her death were released.
Wojcicki and Troper’s 19-year-old son, Marco Troper, died in February on the campus of UC Berkeley, where he lived as a freshman.
[SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]
IN OTHER NEWS:
