Susan Wojcicki, the previous boss of YouTube and considered one of Google’s earliest staff, has died on the age of 56.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced that Ms. Wojcicki had died two years after affected by lung most cancers.
Pichai, who can also be the boss of Google mother or father firm Alphabet, mentioned on X/Twitter that he was “extremely unhappy” and that Ms Wojcicki was “as central to Google’s historical past as anybody.”
Ms. Wojcicki, as soon as described as “a very powerful Googler you have by no means heard of,” was current on the firm’s inception and in 1998, she leased her menlo park garage To Sergey Brin and Larry Web page, the founders of the search engine firm.
She was later persuaded to stop her job at chip big Intel to hitch Google, changing into the corporate’s sixteenth worker.
Ms. Wojcicki went on to steer YouTube, the net video-sharing firm owned by Google, for 9 years till she resigned in 2023 to deal with “my household, well being, and private tasks that I am enthusiastic about.”
Ms. Wojcicki is likely one of the few ladies holding senior positions within the expertise business.
She desires to encourage extra ladies to enter this area, In an interview with BBC Newshour in 2013 The longer term will probably be “more and more influenced by digitalisation”.
“However then I noticed there have been only a few ladies on this business,” she mentioned. “Total, the common tech business is about 20% feminine, and I additionally appeared on the pipeline of ladies getting technical levels and located that there are only a few.”
Whereas Ms. Wojcicki rose to the place of YouTube boss, her tenure was not with out controversy. The platform has been criticized for its dealing with of misinformation on-line, together with in the course of the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2022, a number of fact-checking teams wrote to her, accusing YouTube of being “one of many world’s main conduits for disinformation and misinformation on-line.”
After a 12 months, Ms. Wojcicki resigned to deal with her private life and well being.
Asserting her loss of life “with deep unhappiness”, her husband Dennis Troper mentioned: “My beloved spouse and mom of our 5 youngsters, resides with non-small cell lung most cancers. After two years, he left us as we speak.
