YouTube’s former chief executive and long-time Google executive Susan Wojcicki has died aged 56 after a two-year battle with lung cancer.
“It is with profound sadness that I share the news of Susan Wojcicki passing,” Dennis Troper, Wojcicki’s husband, said in a Facebook post.
“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.”
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Google chief executive Sundar Pichai paid tribute to Wojcicki in a blog 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,” Pichai said.
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 $2.5 billion ($US1.65 billion).
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,” Wojcicki wrote in a blog post on the day she left YouTube.
“Their names were Larry and Sergey … It would be one of the best decisions of my life,” she said, 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.