Susan Wojcicki

Her Life

Susan Wojcicki is an American tech industry executive who was CEO of YouTube from 2014-2023.

Wojcicki's father was a physics professor at Stanford University, and her mother was a teacher. She grew up in the Stanford, California, area and later studied history and literature at Harvard, economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and business at the University of California, Los Angeles.

After returning to Silicon Valley in 1998, she rented out garage space in her Menlo Park home to the newly incorporated Google Inc., which briefly used it as the company's first headquarters office.

She became Google's first marketing manager in 1999, her first task was to find ways of generating revenue from the company's signature search engine. Her first big success came in 2000, with the debut of AdWords, the clickable text-only advertisements that appear on Google search pages. Wojcicki first became involved with video sharing in connection with the launch of Google Video in 2005.

The following year she oversaw the purchase of rival YouTube. Wojcicki, who was elevated to senior vice president at Google in 2010, moved over to YouTube in 2014 and became the company's CEO later that year. She thus became head of an operation that claimed to have more than one billion monthly users.