The modest house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, had been vacant for only a few years when I visited in 2008, but its ghosts were still there. This was where Larry Page and Sergey Brin had started Google a decade earlier. Here was the garage that had once been filled with newly delivered servers and routers; there were the carpeted rooms at the back of the house where Page, Brin and their first employee, Craig Silverstein, churned out code; out the window was the backyard with the hot tub.
In Google’s early years, the house was owned by a young couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had recently purchased it for $615,000. To pay the mortgage, the Google duo paid them $1,700 a month to rent unused space. “They came in through the garage,” Wojcicki later told me. “They weren’t allowed in through the front door.”
Wojcicki connected with the young founders and became captivated by the search engine startup’s rise. She soon joined herself, around the time the company’s 15-employee team moved out of her home and into a proper office above a bike shop in Palo Alto. In 2002, she took over Google’s advertising business and eventually led a multibillion-dollar company that transformed the industry. In 2014, she became CEO of the company’s video product YouTube, where she ran one of the world’s largest media companies and steered it through competition with other social networks and content moderation crises. Despite being one of the most powerful women in business, she kept a low profile, even until her departure in February 2023, “to start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects that I’m passionate about,” as she wrote on the company’s blog.
That same understated ethic continued into her difficult final years, when she was secretly battling non-small cell lung cancer. On Friday, Troper reported that Susan Wojcicki had died at the age of 56.
In a company known for its idiosyncrasies, absurd ambitions, and flashy profiles, Wojcicki somehow managed to elude the spotlight while shouldering monumental responsibilities. Even before Eric Schmidt became Google’s CEO and became known as the adult in the room, Wojcicki was a calm, analytical presence whose sage counsel and relentless work ethic qualified her for the company’s most crucial roles even as Google, later known as Alphabet, grew into one of the world’s most powerful corporations. In the early days, her educational background—including a degree from Harvard and an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management—and her Intel experience made her a relative veteran compared with the peaches-of-the-wool executives who ran it. She was also literally part of the family, after cofounder Brin married her sister Ann (they divorced in 2015).
Long before Schmidt's arrival, Wojcicki was active in steering Google toward profitability. “There was a transition where we realized we could make a lot more money from advertising, rather than syndicating searches across the web,” she told me in a 2008 interview for my history of the company.
