Susan Wojcicki, the previous boss of YouTube and one in every of Google’s earliest workers, has died aged 56.
Google’s chief govt Sundar Pichai introduced that Ms Wojcicki had handed away after two years of residing with lung most cancers.
Mr Pichai, who can also be the boss of Google’s father or mother firm Alphabet, mentioned on X/Twitter he was “unbelievably saddened” and Ms Wojcicki was “as core to the historical past of Google as anybody”.
As soon as described because the “most essential Googler you’ve got by no means heard of”, Ms Wojcicki was current on the firm’s beginnings when, in 1998, she rented out her Menlo Park storage to the search engine agency’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Web page.
She was later persuaded to depart her job at chip large Intel to hitch Google, turning into the agency’s sixteenth worker.
Ms Wojcicki would go on to guide YouTube, the net video sharing firm owned by Google, for 9 years till 2023 when she stepped right down to focus “on my household, well being and private initiatives I am captivated with”.
Ms Wojcicki was one in every of comparatively few ladies to carry a senior function within the expertise trade.
She wished to encourage extra ladies to enter the sphere, telling the BBC’s Newshour in 2013 that the long run was going to be “more and more digitally influenced”.
“However then I see there are only a few ladies within the trade,” she mentioned. “Total the tech trade has, on common, in all probability about 20% ladies and I additionally take a look at the pipeline of ladies popping out of technical levels and it is extremely small.”
Whereas Ms Wojcicki rose to turn into the boss of YouTube, her tenure was not with out controversy. The platform confronted criticism over its dealing with of on-line disinformation, together with through the Covid pandemic.
In 2022, quite a few fact-checking organisations wrote to her accusing YouTube of being “one of many main conduits of on-line disinformation and misinformation worldwide”.
Ms Wojcicki stepped down a 12 months later to deal with her private life and well being.
Saying her dying “with profound disappointment”, her husband Dennis Troper mentioned: “My beloved spouse of 26 years and mom to our 5 kids left us at present after two years of residing with non-small-cell lung most cancers.”
