- In 1998, Susan Wojcicki rented her garage in Menlo Park, California, to Sergey Brin and Larry Page for $1,700 a month.
- The next year, she would join Google as its 16th employee.
- Here’s a glimpse at Wojcicki’s life and her rise at Google from an early employee to YouTube’s chief exec.
Most landlords only hope their renters pay on time, keep a tidy space, and don’t disturb the neighbors.
But Susan Wojcicki’s renters ended up offering up a bit more: the chance to become employee No. 16 at a young search-engine startup called Google.
Of course, it’s taken more than this incredible circumstance for Wojcicki to rise in the ranks at Google. From expanding the company’s ad business to persuading its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to purchase an up-and-coming video-sharing service called YouTube, Wojcicki has played a vital role in Google’s becoming one of the world’s most valuable companies.
Here’s a glimpse at Wojcicki’s life and her rise at Google from employee No. 16 to YouTube’s chief exec:
Susan Wojcicki (pronounced whoa-jit-ski), 50, is a Silicon Valley native.
Source: Forbes
Wojcicki grew up on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, California, where her father, Stanley Wojcicki, was chair of the physics department.
Source: USA Today
Wojcicki's mother, Esther Wojcicki, has taught journalism for more than two decades at Palo Alto High School, where she has mentored notable students like Steve Jobs' daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs and the actor James Franco.
Source: Business Insider, SF Gate
Wojcicki is the oldest of three sisters. Her youngest sister, Anne Wojcicki, is the cofounder and CEO of the genetics company, 23andMe.
Anne would go on to marry and later divorce Sergey Brin.
Wojcicki attended Harvard University, where she studied history and literature. Years later, she said an introductory computer-science course she took her senior year "changed how I think about everything."
Wojcicki also received a master's degree in economics from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an MBA from UCLA's Anderson School of Management.
Source: Business Insider, Mercury News
Upon completing her MBA in 1998, Wojcicki moved back to the Bay Area, where she bought a 2,000-square-foot house in Menlo Park for $600,000. To help pay her mortgage, she rented her garage to two Stanford doctoral students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were working on their new search-engine company, called Google.
Wojcicki charged Page and Brin $1,700 a month to rent the garage space.
Source: USA Today
In 1999, Wojcicki joined the Google team as its 16th employee and the company's first marketing manager.
Source: Mercury News
One of her early marketing projects was to liven up the Google logo for holidays and special events. Today, Google Doodles appear daily and are beloved by users.
Source: USA Today
In 2003, Wojcicki came up with an idea that drastically increased Google's advertising potential: She suggested that Google's ad offering be available not only within search but on websites and blogs across the internet. The product became known as AdSense.
Today, more than 11 million websites use AdSense. In 2017, Google's total ad revenue was over $95 billion.
Source: USA Today
By 2006, Wojcicki was running Google Videos. But another free video-sharing website, YouTube, was generating buzz at the time and attracting millions of users.
Wojcicki had seen how strongly her own children reacted to user-generated videos and knew there would be huge potential in such a platform.
So she "worked up some spreadsheets" to justify the purchase with Page and Brin, she said. Ultimately, she persuaded the Google cofounders to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion.
In May, Morgan Stanley valued YouTube at $160 billion.
In October 2010, Wojcicki was promoted from vice president to senior vice president overseeing ad products. At the time, there were only eight SVPs at Google.
Source: Business Insider
By February 2014, Wojcicki replaced Google's ninth employee, Salar Kamangar, as the CEO of YouTube.
Source: Business Insider
In her first year as YouTube's CEO, Wojcicki went on maternity leave for the birth of her fifth child. The chief exec wrote an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal arguing that the US should become a leader in maternity-leave benefits. "Support for motherhood shouldn't be a matter of luck; it should be a matter of course," she wrote.
Wojcicki was four months pregnant when she joined Google in 1999 and became the company's first employee to go on maternity leave.
It "was a bit of a leap," she told Glamour in a 2014 interview, describing her decision to join the 15-person startup while pregnant. "But sometimes you have to do the right thing for you right now."
Source: Wall Street Journal
Over the years, Wojcicki has been an outspoken proponent of closing the gender gap in the tech industry. "Tech is an incredible force that will change our world in ways we can't anticipate," Wojcicki told Forbes in a 2018 interview. "If that force is only 20% to 30% women, that is a problem."
In 2017, she wrote an article in Vanity Fair titled "How to Break Up the Silicon Valley Boys' Club."
Later that year, Wojcicki wrote an op-ed article for Fortune where she described having to explain to her daughter that there are no biological reasons that fewer women are in tech.
Source: Forbes
Under Wojcicki's leadership, YouTube has grown to 1.8 billion monthly users — just shy of Facebook's 2 billion users. It has also become the most popular social network among teenagers.
Major products released during Wojcicki's tenure include YouTube Gaming, YouTube Music, YouTube Premium, and YouTube TV.
Source: Business Insider, Pew Research Center
In 2018, Wojcicki was ranked seventh on Forbes' "Power Women" list. Her net worth is estimated to be $480 million.
Source: Forbes