Google’s first office was a garage in Menlo Park, and its landlord was Susan Wojcicki. She and her husband Dennis Troper had just bought the house on Santa Margarita Avenue for $615,000, and to help with the mortgage they rented unused space to Larry Page and Sergey Brin for $1,700 a month. “They entered through the garage,” Wojcicki later told Wired. “They weren’t allowed to enter the front door.” She died on 9 August 2024, aged 56, after a private fight with non-small cell lung cancer.
A veteran among the founders
Wojcicki was never the loudest figure at Google. Wired described her as a calm, analytical presence who kept out of the biggest spotlights while taking on enormous responsibilities. In the earliest days she was something of a veteran next to the young founders, with a Harvard degree, an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and experience at Intel. She was family too, since Brin married her sister Ann. They divorced in 2015.
Her garage rental also shaped the company’s culture, or so she thought. Google’s roots in a residential house, she once speculated, led to its habit of giving staff the comforts of home, such as showers, food, and a washer and dryer. The famous food culture, she said, began when she and her husband ordered a refrigerator for their kitchen. She was in the shower when it arrived, so Page and Brin answered the door and had it installed in the garage. That appliance became the seed of the first Google micro-kitchen.
YouTube
In 2014 Salar Kamangar left the top job at YouTube, which already had a billion users. The obvious move for Page, then Google’s CEO, was to hire an experienced media executive. He backed Wojcicki instead. “When I got to YouTube, it felt like going back in time, it felt like this is Google 2002,” she said at the WIRED25 conference in 2018.
She added another billion users, built revenue to more than $32 billion a year, and held a leading position in short-form video despite rivals such as TikTok. When she retired in 2023, Wired noted, she was still wrestling with the problem of policing content on a platform that size.
Mentor and advocate
She was known for coaching colleagues. Sheryl Sandberg, who used her Google years as a launchpad for her COO role at Meta, wrote that Wojcicki “taught me the business and helped me navigate a growing, fairly chaotic organization.” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, whom she also mentored, called her loss devastating for the thousands of Googlers she led and the millions who benefited from her leadership.
Wojcicki was four months pregnant when she joined Google and considered herself lucky that her employers granted leave after the birth. A mother of five, she became a champion for family leave, for women well beyond her own company. Wired’s writer remembered her as grounded and unpretentious despite her wealth, with family her clear priority.
She is survived by her husband and four children. Her son Marco died of an overdose in February 2024. Her sisters are Ann, cofounder of 23andMe, and Janet, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Her mother Esther is a well-known educator, and her father Stanley, a particle physicist who taught at Stanford, died the year before.
In 2011 Wired asked her why she kept working at Google after making a fortune from her early stake. “Google is fascinating,” she answered, “and the book isn’t finished. I’m creating, living, building, and writing those chapters.”
