Susan Wojcicki, the previous boss of YouTube and one in all Google’s earliest workers, has died aged 56.
Google’s chief govt Sundar Pichai introduced that Ms Wojcicki had handed away after two years of dwelling with lung most cancers.
Mr Pichai, who can be the boss of Google’s mum or dad 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 essential Googler you’ve got by no means heard of”, Ms Wojcicki was current on the firm’s beginnings when, in 1998, she rented out her Menlo Park storage to the search engine agency’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Web page.
She was later persuaded to depart 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 keen about”.
Ms Wojcicki was one in all comparatively few girls to carry a senior function within the expertise business.
She wished to encourage extra ladies to enter the sphere, telling the BBC’s Newshour in 2013 that the long run was going to be “more and more digitally influenced”.
“However then I see there are only a few girls within the business,” she mentioned. “General the tech business has, on common, in all probability about 20% girls and I additionally take a look at the pipeline of ladies popping out of technical levels and it is vitally small.”
Whereas Ms Wojcicki rose to turn into 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 yr later to concentrate on her private life and well being.
Saying her demise “with profound unhappiness”, her husband Dennis Troper mentioned: “My beloved spouse of 26 years and mom to our 5 kids left us right now after two years of dwelling with non-small-cell lung most cancers.”
