Obituary: Susan Wojcicki
By Fay Capstick
This week, we shall do something a little different. This week’s blog is an obituary for Susan Wojcicki, a female pioneer in the business world who helped shape our digital lives.
Who was Susan Wojcicki?
Susan Wojcicki was an American businesswoman who helped create many of the companies and services that we use today. She was born in 1968 in California and educated at Harvard. Her parents were a journalist and a physics professor. If her surname is familiar, it will likely be because her sister, Anne Wojcicki, is the founder and CEO of 23andMe.com, the health and ancestry testing service. Her mother, Esther, wrote a guide for parents, How to Raise Successful People. It seems her mother was very good at doing exactly that.
Susan was a humanities student, which doesn’t fit with the stereotype of a Silicon Valley business person, graduating with a degree in history and literature. A planned PhD in economics was dropped once she developed an interest in tech, and that interest in tech came at exactly the right time as the internet was being shaped.
What did she do?
Susan will be best known as the CEO of YouTube between 2014-2023, but that isn’t where she started. Susan worked at Intel in marketing before becoming Google’s first marketing manager in 1999. In fact, one of Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin, became her brother-in-law for a while.
At Google, a newly married Wojcicki was employee number 16. Fun fact: the Google office was originally in Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California. This follows in the footsteps of Hewlett Packard, which was also based in a garage, and Parker Shaw ourselves. The rent they paid on the garage helped to cover her mortgage. Once they outgrew the garage they expanded into three ground-floor bedrooms. Wojcicki was extremely committed to the success of Google!
She worked on their marketing strategy and helped to create the Google logo. Susan was also the first project manager on AdSense, eventually overseeing all of Google’s advertising and analytics. By 2010 she was senior vice-president of Google. It has been estimated that “she was responsible for generating 97 per cent of the company’s revenues” (The Times).
This all means that she had a huge role in shaping the e-commerce ecosystem that we all live in today.
YouTube
Remember how the world was before we could watch anything at any time on YouTube? No, me neither. It was Wojcicki who had the idea that Google should purchase YouTube, a small start-up. This happened nearly twenty years ago in 2006. Fun fact: Google paid $1.65 billion!
By 2014 Wojcicki was the CEO of YouTube.
YouTube exploded in popularity under Wojcicki, with 2 billion users a month consuming one billion hours of content a day. In a move for gender equality, under her leadership, the percentage of female staff at YouTube rose to nearly a third (something that we have seen in previous blogs is a hard feat to accomplish in tech). She was also the marketing brain behind the YouTube Premium service, a paid monthly subscription which cuts out the pesky adverts. By 2022 they had 80 million signed-up subscribers.
Salesforce
In 2014 as well as becoming CEO of YouTube, Susan joined the board of Salesforce.
What happened?
Wojcicki left YouTube in 2023, resigning to focus on “health”. She kept her advisory role at Google and Alphabet.
Sadly, on 9th August 2024, it was announced that she had died from cancer. She was married with five children.
How will Susan Wojcicki be remembered?
As a hugely pioneering figure in the world of STEM, but also as a hugely pioneering woman in the world of business.Time named her one of the world’s most influential people in 2015, and called her “the most powerful woman on the Internet”. In 2023 Forbes listed her as one of America’s Self-Made Women and estimated her fortune as $800 million.
Susan was seen as a normal person in an industry filled with distinctly unusual leaders, mostly all male. Unlike them, she was uninterested in the fame or celebrity that could have been hers, choosing to live a normal life of family, cooking, and yoga.
She was passionate about helping to reverse gender discrimination in the tech sector, as well as helping get girls into STEM and coding. She was also an advocate for paid family leave (being the first Google employee to take maternity leave), something generally lacking in the US, and one which further causes women to be uninterested in working in the male-dominated tech industry known for its bro-culture, a culture she felt was “corrosive to family life” (The Times).
Final thoughts
At Parker Shaw we have been at the forefront of the sector we serve, IT & Digital Recruitment and Consulting, for over 35 years. We can advise you on all your hiring needs. If you are looking for your next job in the IT sector please check our Jobs Board for our current live vacancies at https://parkershaw.co.uk/jobs-board.