The unassuming house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, had been empty for only a couple of years when I visited in 2008, but the ghosts were still there. This was where Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google a decade previous. Here was the garage once packed 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 infancy the house belonged to a young couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had recently purchased it for $615,000. To help with the mortgage, the Google duo paid them $1,700 a month to rent unused space. “They entered through the garage,” Wojcicki later told me. “They weren’t allowed to enter the front door.”
Wojcicki found herself hanging out with the young founders and became fascinated by the rise of the search startup. She soon joined it herself, about the time the 15-person company moved out of her house and into an actual office, over a bicycle shop in Palo Alto. In 2002, she took over the Google advertising arm, eventually heading a multibillion dollar business that transformed the entire industry. In 2014, she became CEO of the company’s video product YouTube, running one of the world’s biggest media properties and navigating it through competitions with other social networks and crises of content moderation. Though she was one of the most powerful women in all of business, she played it low-key, even to her departure in February 2023, “to start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about,” as she wrote in the company blog.
That same low-key ethic persisted in her difficult final years, where she privately battled non-small cell lung cancer. On Friday, Troper said that Susan Wojcicki died at 56.
In a company known for head-scratching quirks, absurd ambitions, and splashy profiles, Wojcicki somehow ducked the biggest spotlights 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 calm, analytical presence whose wise counsel and steady work ethic qualified her for the company’s most critical roles, even as Google, later named Alphabet, grew to one of the world’s most powerful companies. In the earliest days, her educational pedigree–including a degree at Harvard and an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA—as well as her Intel experience, made her a relative veteran compared to the peach-fuzzers in charge. She was also literally a member of the family, after cofounder Brin married her sister Ann (they divorced in 2015).
Well before Schmidt’s arrival, Wojcicki was active in steering Google towards profitability. “There was a transition where we realized that we could make a lot more money from the advertising, as opposed to syndicating search on the web,” she told me in 2008, in an interview for my history of the company.