This an inconspicuous house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, had been empty for only a few years when I visited in 2008, but the ghosts were still there. This was where Larry Page and Sergey Brin had founded Google a decade earlier. Here was the garage that had once been filled with newly delivered servers and routers; the carpeted rooms in the back of the house where Page, Brin, and their first employee, Craig Silverstein, wrote code; outside was the backyard with a heated tub.
In Google’s early days, the house belonged to a teenage couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had recently purchased it for $615,000. To facilitate pay off the mortgage, the Google duo paid them $1,700 a month to rent the unused space. “They came in through the garage,” Wojcicki later told me. “They weren’t allowed in the front door.”
Wojcicki began meeting with teenage founders and became fascinated by the search startup’s growth. She soon joined it herself, around the time the 15-person company moved out of her home and into a real office above a Palo Alto bike shop. In 2002, she took over Google’s advertising division, eventually running a multibillion-dollar business that transformed the industry. In 2014, she became CEO of YouTube’s video product, managing one of the world’s largest media brands and navigating it through competition with other social networks and content moderation crises. Though she was one of the most powerful women in the business, she played it protected, even until her departure in February 2023 “to start a new chapter focused on my family, my health, and personal projects that I’m passionate about.” as she wrote on the company blog.
That same reserved ethic carried through into her arduous final years, as she privately battled non-small cell lung cancer. On Friday, Troper said Susan Wojcicki he died at the age of 56.
At a company known for its eccentricities, absurd ambitions, and flashy profiles, Wojcicki somehow avoided the limelight while taking on gargantuan responsibilities. Even before Eric Schmidt became Google’s CEO and became known as the adult in the room, Wojcicki was a placid, analytical figure whose sage advice and steady work ethic qualified her for top roles at the company, even as Google, later called Alphabet, grew into one of the most powerful companies in the world. In her earliest days, her education—including a Harvard degree and an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management—as well as her experience at Intel, made her a relative veteran compared to the peach fuzzers at the helm. She was also, quite literally, part of the family, after cofounder Brin married her sister, Ann (they divorced in 2015).
Long before Schmidt arrived, Wojcicki was actively steering Google toward profitability. “There was a transition period where we realized we could make a lot more money on advertising, as opposed to syndicating search across the web,” she told me in a 2008 interview for my company history.