Susan Wojcicki, the previous boss of YouTube and one in all Google’s earliest workers, has died aged 56.
Google’s chief government Sundar Pichai introduced that Ms Wojcicki had handed away after two years of residing with lung most cancers.
Mr Pichai, who can also be the boss of Google’s dad or mum firm Alphabet, stated 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’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 garage to the search engine agency’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Web page.
She was later persuaded to depart her job at chip big Intel to affix Google, turning into the agency’s sixteenth worker.
Ms Wojcicki would go on to guide YouTube, the net video sharing firm owned by Google, for 9 years till 2023 when she stepped all the way down to focus “on my household, well being and private initiatives I am keen about”.
Ms Wojcicki was one in all comparatively few girls to carry a senior function within the expertise business.
She needed to encourage extra ladies to enter the sector, 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 stated. “General the tech business has, on common, in all probability about 20% girls and I additionally take 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 throughout 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 give attention to her private life and well being.
Saying her demise “with profound unhappiness”, her husband Dennis Troper stated: “My beloved spouse of 26 years and mom to our 5 youngsters left us as we speak after two years of residing with non-small-cell lung most cancers.”
