The business executive helped turn Google into an internet juggernaut and became one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley.
Susan Wojcicki, who helped turn Google from a start-up in her garage into an internet juggernaut, and who became one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent female executives with her leadership of YouTube, died on Friday. She was 56.
Her death was confirmed by her husband, Dennis Troper, who wrote on Facebook that she had been living with lung cancer for two years. He did not say where she died.
Ms. Wojcicki’s more than two decades with Google began in 1998 in her house in Menlo Park, Calif., part of which she rented to her friends Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s founders. For $1,700 a month, the two used the garage as their office to build the search engine.
Ms. Wojcicki, who had been working at Intel, soon joined Google as one of its earliest employees and was its first marketing manager. Over the years, she reached its executive ranks, becoming Google’s most senior woman employee. She eventually led YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006, and which became one of the world’s largest social media companies.
“She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said in a statement.
When she became YouTube’s chief executive in 2014, Ms. Wojcicki was hailed as the most powerful woman in advertising. She had made Google enormously profitable, and she was expected to repeat the trick at YouTube. She led Google’s ad business and played a key role in its acquisition of DoubleClick, an advertising technology company, in 2007.