Few people have had greater unseen influence on today’s younger generations than Susan Wojcicki, who has died aged 56 after suffering from lung cancer. From 2015 to 2023, Wojcicki was chief executive of the video sharing platform YouTube, a subsidiary of the Google division of the US technology conglomerate Alphabet, increasing its revenues to upwards of $30bn and its user base to nearly 3 billion, and watching it reshape entertainment and politics.
Her roots at Google went back to the company’s earliest days in 1998 when, as a cash-strapped student in California with mortgage debt and student loans, she sought to rent out a couple of rooms. The takers, at $1,700 a month, were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whom she had met through a mutual friend and who were looking for cheap offices for their newly incorporated company. The following year, Wojcicki became Google’s first marketing manager and its 16th employee.
