Susan Wojcicki

Susan Diane Wojcicki was born in Santa Clara, California, on July 5, 1968, the daughter of Esther Wojcicki, an American journalist, and Stanley Wojcicki, a Polish physics professor at Stanford University. Her paternal grandfather, Franciszek Wójcicki, was a Polish politician who was elected MP during the 1947 Polish legislative election. Her paternal grandmother, Janina Wójcicka Hoskins, was a Polish-American librarian at the Library of Congress and was responsible for building the largest collection of Polish material in the U.S. She had two sisters: Janet, a doctor of anthropology and epidemiology, and Anne, an entrepreneur who is the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe.

Wojcicki grew up on the Stanford campus, where mathematical scientist George Dantzig was her neighbor. She attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, and wrote for the school newspaper. Her first business was selling "spice ropes" door-to-door at the age of eleven. A humanities major in college, she took her first computer science class as a senior. She studied history and literature at Harvard University and graduated with honors in 1990. She originally planned on getting a PhD in economics and pursuing a career in academia but changed her plans when she discovered an interest in technology. She subsequently earned her MS in economics in 1993 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her MBA in 1998 from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Before Google

Before becoming Google's first marketing manager in 1999, Wojcicki worked in marketing at Intel Corporation in Santa Clara, California, and was a management consultant at Bain & Company and at R.B. Webber & Company.

Google

Wojcicki was Google employee #16. In September 1998, the same month that Google was incorporated, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up the Google office in Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, California. Wojcicki was introduced to the pair through a mutual friend around the time she was newly married and struggling to afford the mortgage on her recent house purchase. Page and Brin would use Wojcicki's garage as their office for $1,700 a month. They later converted three small ground-floor bedrooms into additional workspaces to accommodate their growing team. At Google, she worked on the initial viral marketing programs, helped create the company's longtime logo with designer Ruth Kedar, and spearheaded the first Google Doodles. She also co-developed and launched Google Image Search with engineer Huican Zhu.

In 2003, Wojcicki was the first product manager of one of Google's seminal advertising products—AdSense. She earned the Google Founders' Award in recognition for this work. Wojcicki was subsequently promoted to Google's senior vice president of Advertising & Commerce, and oversaw the company's advertising and analytic products, including AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Analytics.

YouTube, then a small start-up, was successfully competing with Google's Google Video service, overseen by Wojcicki. She had recommended and subsequently managed the $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube in 2006.

Wojcicki married Dennis Troper, a director of product management at Google, in Belmont, California, on August 23, 1998. He is also Jewish. They had five children. On December 16, 2014, ahead of taking her fifth maternity leave, she wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal about the importance of paid maternity leave. She was often quoted as talking about the importance of finding the balance between family and career.

In addition to her American citizenship, Wojcicki held Polish citizenship through her father.

On February 13, 2024, Wojcicki's son Marco Troper, a 19-year-old student at the University of California, Berkeley, died of acute drug abuse.

Wojcicki died on August 9, 2024, at the age of 56, after living with non-small-cell lung cancer for two years.

In November 2024, three months after her death, a final message prepared by Wojcicki was publicly released where she reflected on her career, highlighting the significance of creativity, collaboration, and adhering to core values in leadership.