Susan Wojcicki, the previous boss of YouTube and one in all Google’s earliest staff, has died aged 56.
Google’s chief government 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, mentioned 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 necessary 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 garage to the search engine agency’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Web page.
She was later persuaded to go away her job at chip large Intel to hitch Google, turning into the agency’s sixteenth worker.
Ms Wojcicki would go on to steer YouTube, the net video sharing firm owned by Google, for 9 years till 2023 when she stepped right down to focus “on my household, well being and private tasks I am enthusiastic about”.
Ms Wojcicki was one in all comparatively few girls to carry a senior function within the expertise trade.
She needed to encourage extra women to enter the sector, telling the BBC’s Newshour in 2013 that the longer term was going to be “more and more digitally influenced”.
“However then I see there are only a few girls within the trade,” she mentioned. “General the tech trade has, on common, in all probability about 20% girls and I additionally have a look at the pipeline of women popping out of technical levels and it is vitally small.”
Whereas Ms Wojcicki rose to grow 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 in the course of the Covid pandemic.
In 2022, quite 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 deal with her private life and well being.
Saying her loss of life “with profound unhappiness”, her husband Dennis Troper mentioned: “My beloved spouse of 26 years and mom to our 5 kids left us at present after two years of dwelling with non-small-cell lung most cancers.”
