Susan Wojcicki, the previous boss of YouTube and one among Google’s earliest staff, has died aged 56.
Google’s chief govt Sundar Pichai introduced that Ms Wojcicki had handed away after two years of dwelling with lung most cancers.
Mr Pichai, who can also be the boss of Google’s guardian firm Alphabet, stated 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 vital Googler you have 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 big Intel to affix Google, changing into the agency’s sixteenth worker.
Ms Wojcicki would go on to steer YouTube, the web video sharing firm owned by Google, for 9 years till 2023 when she stepped all the way down to focus “on my household, well being and private tasks I am obsessed with”.
Ms Wojcicki was one among comparatively few girls to carry a senior position within the expertise trade.
She wished to encourage extra ladies to enter the sector, 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 girls within the trade,” she stated. “Total the tech trade has, on common, in all probability about 20% girls and I additionally take a look at the pipeline of women popping out of technical levels and it is extremely small.”
Whereas Ms Wojcicki rose to turn out to be 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, a lot of 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 give attention to her private life and well being.
Asserting her loss of life “with profound unhappiness”, her husband Dennis Troper stated: “My beloved spouse of 26 years and mom to our 5 kids left us at this time after two years of dwelling with non-small-cell lung most cancers.”
