He modest house On Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, it had been empty for only a couple of years when I visited in 2008, but the ghosts were still there. This was where Larry Page and Sergey Brin had founded Google a decade earlier. There was the garage, once packed with newly delivered servers and routers; there were the carpeted rooms in the back of the house where Page, Brin, and their first employee, Craig Silverstein, wrote code; there was a view out the window of the backyard with the hot tub.
In Google’s early days, the house belonged to a young couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had recently purchased it for $615,000. To help with the mortgage, the Google duo paid them $1,700 a month to rent the space they weren’t using. “They came in through the garage,” Wojcicki told me later. “They weren’t allowed in the front door.”
Wojcicki found herself hanging out with the young founders and becoming fascinated by the search company’s rise. She soon joined it, around the same time the 15-person company moved from its home to a real office, above a bike shop in Palo Alto. In 2002, she took over Google’s advertising division, eventually running a multibillion-dollar business that transformed the entire industry. In 2014, she became CEO of the company’s video product, YouTube, running one of the world’s largest media properties and navigating it through competitions with other social networks and content moderation crises. Though she was one of the most powerful women in all of business, she remained low-key, even until her departure in February 2023, “to begin a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects that I’m passionate about.” as she wrote on the company blog.
That same low-key ethic persisted into her difficult later years, when she privately battled non-small cell lung cancer. On Friday, Troper said that Susan Wojcicki He died at the age of 56.
At a company known for its baffling quirks, absurd ambitions and flashy profiles, Wojcicki somehow dodged the biggest spotlights while shouldering outsize responsibilities. Even before Eric Schmidt became Google’s CEO and was known as the adult in the room, Wojcicki was a calm, analytical presence whose sage advice and steady work ethic qualified her for the company’s most critical roles, even as Google, later renamed Alphabet, grew to become one of the most powerful companies in the world. In the early days, her educational pedigree, which included a degree from Harvard and an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, as well as her experience at Intel, made her a relative veteran compared to the pessimists in charge. She was also literally a member of the family, after cofounder Brin married her sister Ann (they divorced in 2015).
Long before Schmidt came on board, Wojcicki had already been working to make Google profitable. “There was a transition where we realized we could make a lot more money from advertising, rather than from syndicated web search,” she told me in a 2008 interview for My company story.
