Susan Diane Wojcicki ( ; born July 5, 1968) is an American business executive who was the chief executive officer (CEO) of YouTube from 2014 to 2023. Her net worth was estimated at $765 million in 2022.
Wojcicki has worked in the technology industry for over twenty years. She became involved in the creation of Google in 1998 when she rented out her garage as an office to the company's founders. She worked as Google's first marketing manager in 1999, and later led the company's online advertising business and original video service. After observing the success of YouTube, she suggested that Google should buy it; the deal was approved for $1.65 billion in 2006. She was appointed CEO of YouTube in 2014, serving until resigning in February 2023.
Early life
Susan Diane Wojcicki was born in Santa Clara County, California, on July 5, 1968, the daughter of Esther Wojcicki, an American journalist, and Stanley Wojcicki, a Polish physics professor at Stanford University. Her maternal grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants. Her paternal grandfather, Franciszek Wójcicki, was a Polish politician who had been elected MP during the 1947 Polish legislative election. Her paternal grandmother, Janina Wójcicka Hoskins, was a Polish-American librarian at the Library of Congress and was responsible for building the largest collection of Polish material in the U.S. She has two sisters: Janet, a doctor of anthropology and epidemiology, and Anne, an entrepreneur who is the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe.
Wojcicki grew up on the Stanford campus, where mathematical scientist George Dantzig was her neighbor. She attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, and wrote for the school newspaper. Her first business was selling "spice ropes" door-to-door at the age of eleven. A humanities major in college, she took her first computer science class as a senior. She studied history and literature at Harvard University and graduated with honors in 1990. She originally planned on getting a PhD in economics and pursuing a career in academia, but changed her plans when she discovered an interest in technology. She also received her MS in economics in 1993 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MBA in 1998 from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Career
Before Google
Before becoming Google's first marketing manager in 1999, Wojcicki worked in marketing at Intel Corporation in Santa Clara, California, and was a management consultant at Bain & Company and R.B. Webber & Company.
In September 1998, the same month that Google was incorporated, its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up office in Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, California. At Google, she worked on the initial viral marketing programs, helped create the company's longtime logo with designer Ruth Kedar, and spearheaded the first Google Doodles. She also co-developed and launched Google Image Search with engineer Huican Zhu.
In 2003, Wojcicki was the first product manager of one of Google's seminal advertising products—AdSense. She earned the Google Founders' Award in recognition for this work. Wojcicki was subsequently promoted to Google's senior vice president of Advertising & Commerce, and oversaw the company's advertising and analytic products, including AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Analytics.
YouTube, then a small start-up, was successfully competing with Google's Google Video service, overseen by Wojcicki. She recommended and subsequently managed the $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube in 2006.
YouTube
In February 2014, Wojcicki became the CEO of YouTube. She was named "the most important person in advertising," as well as named one of Times 100 most influential people in 2015 and described in a later issue of Time as "the most powerful woman on the Internet." In December 2014, she joined the board of Salesforce. She also serves on the board of Room to Read, an organization that focuses on literacy and gender equality in education, and is a board member of UCLA Anderson School of Management.