This nondescript house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, had been vacant for only a few years when I visited in 2008, but the ghosts were still there. This is where Larry Page and Sergey Brin had started Google a decade earlier. There’s a garage here that was once packed with newly delivered servers and routers, a carpeted room at the back of the house where Page, Brin, and first employee Craig Silverstein churned out code, and outside the windows is a backyard with a hot tub.
In Google’s early days, the house belonged to a young couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had just purchased it for $615,000. To help pay off their mortgage, the Googlers were paying $1,700 a month to rent out the unused space. “They entered through the garage,” Wojcicki told me later. “They weren’t allowed in through the front door.”
Wojcicki began hanging out with young founders and was fascinated by the rise of search startups. She joined the company soon after, when the 15-person company moved from her home to an office above a bike shop in Palo Alto. In 2002, she took over Google’s advertising division, eventually leading a multibillion-dollar business that transformed an entire industry. In 2014, she became CEO of the company’s video product, YouTube, running one of the world’s largest media properties and navigating competition from other social networks and a content moderation crisis. Although she was one of the most influential women in business, she kept a low profile until her departure in February 2023, as she wrote in a company blog, “to start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects that I’m passionate about.”
That same reserved ethic persisted throughout her difficult final years, as she quietly battled non-small cell lung cancer. On Friday, Troper announced that Susan Wojcicki had died at age 56.
At a company known for its head-scratching eccentricities, outrageous ambitions and flamboyant profile, Wojcicki has somehow assumed enormous responsibility while avoiding the biggest spotlight. Even before Eric Schmidt became CEO of Google and was known as the adult in the room, Wojcicki was a calm, analytical presence whose wise counsel and steady work ethic qualified her to play the most important role at Google (later Alphabet) even as it grew into one of the most powerful companies in the world. In the early days, her education (Harvard, UCLA Anderson MBA) and experience at Intel made her a relative veteran compared to the juniors in charge. After co-founder Brin married her sister Ann (they divorced in 2015), she also literally became part of the family.
Long before Schmidt joined the company, Wojcicki had been actively working to turn Google into a profitable company. “There was a turning point where we realized we could make a lot more money from advertising than we could from doing syndicated search on the web,” she told me in a 2008 interview about the company’s history.
