Susan Wojcicki, former YouTube CEO, dies from cancer at age 56

Susan Wojcicki, former YouTube CEO and longtime Google employee, died Saturday at age 56 after a two-year battle with lung cancer.

“It is with deep sadness that I share the news of the death of Susan Wojcicki. My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children passed away today after 2 years of living with non-small cell lung cancer,” said Dennis Troper, Wojcicki’s husband, in a Facebook post.

“For the past two years, even as she struggled with profound personal challenges, Susan dedicated herself to making the world a better place through her philanthropic work, including supporting research into the disease that ultimately took her life,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post.

Wojcicki, one of the most influential women in technology, joined Google in 1999 and became one of the first female employees of the internet search engine leader, several years before it acquired YouTube.

Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion.

Before becoming CEO of YouTube in 2014, Wojcicki served as senior vice president of advertising products at Google.

After nine years in the role, Wojcicki stepped down from her YouTube role in 2023 to focus on “family, health, and personal projects.” She was replaced by her deputy, Neal Mohan, a senior director of advertising and product who joined Google in 2008. At the time, Wojcicki had planned to take an advisory role at Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

“Twenty-five years ago, I made the decision to join two graduate students at Stanford University who were building a new search engine. Their names were Larry and Sergey… It would have been one of the best decisions of my life,” Wojcicki wrote in a blog post the day she left YouTube, referring to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

“Today we at YouTube lost a teammate, mentor, and friend, Susan Wojcicki,” Mohan said in a post on X.