Former Youtube CEO and longtime Google executive Susan Wojcicki has died at age 56, according to her husband.
“My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non-small cell lung cancer,” Dennis Troper said in a Facebook post Friday night.
“Susan was not just my best friend and partner in life, but a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to many,” Troper said.
No other details of her death were immediately provided.
Shortly after Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated their search engine into a business in 1998, Wojcicki rented the garage of her Menlo Park, home to them for $1,700 a month.
Wojcicki, who played a key role in Google’s creation, stepped down as YouTube’s CEO in 2023 after spending nine years running the video site. Troper is an executive at Google.
Esther Wojcicki, her mother, headed Palo Alto High School’s journalism department for several years and her father, Stanley Wojcicki, who died last year, was chair of Stanford’s physics department.
On Feb. 13, Wojcicki and Troper’s 19-year-old son, Marco Troper, died at the UC-Berkeley campus where he resided as a freshman student. He died as the result of an “accidental overdose,” according to the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office.
Susan Wojcicki’s sister, Anne, is a co-founder and CEO of DNA testing company 23andMe. Her other sister, Janet Wojcicki, is a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at UCSF.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent Alphabet, wrote on his blog, “Over the last two years, even as she dealt with great personal difficulties, Susan devoted herself to making the world better through her philanthropy, including supporting research for the disease that ultimately took her life.”
Former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who was vice president of Google’s sales and operations from 2001 to 2008 before decamping to Facebook, said in a Facebook post that Wojcicki was formative in her tech career.
“She taught me the business and helped me navigate a growing, fairly chaotic organization at the beginning of my career in tech,” Sandberg wrote. “She was the person I turned to for advice over and over again. And she was this person for so many others too.”
Too young to die. I wish her survivors well.
The timing of this loss is so sad. She lost her son in February and she dies six months later. What a tough time for her husband. Susan, RIP.
God Bless! So sorry for the loss to our community. I remember Susan and Dennis during our times at UC Santa Cruz in the early 1990s. They were both always full of energy and joy. It has been great to known you two for all these years.