The unassuming house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, had been empty for less than a few years once I visited in 2008, however the ghosts had been nonetheless there. This was the place Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google a decade earlier. Right here was the storage as soon as full of newly delivered servers and routers; there have been the carpeted rooms behind the home the place Web page, Brin, and their first worker Craig Silverstein churned out code; out the window was the yard with the recent tub.
In Google’s infancy the home belonged to a younger couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had not too long ago bought it for $615,000. To assist with the mortgage, the Google duo paid them $1,700 a month to hire unused area. “They entered via the storage,” Wojcicki later advised me. “They weren’t allowed to enter the entrance door.”
Wojcicki discovered herself hanging out with the younger founders and have become fascinated by the rise of the search startup. She quickly joined it herself, in regards to the time the 15-person firm moved out of her home and into an precise workplace, over a bicycle store in Palo Alto. In 2002, she took over the Google advertising arm, ultimately heading a multibillion greenback enterprise that remodeled your entire trade. In 2014, she turned CEO of the corporate’s video product YouTube, operating one of many world’s largest media properties and navigating it via competitions with different social networks and crises of content material moderation. Although she was some of the highly effective ladies in all of enterprise, she performed it low-key, even to her departure in February 2023, “to start out a brand new chapter targeted on my household, well being, and private tasks I’m obsessed with,” as she wrote within the firm weblog.
That very same low-key ethic persevered in her tough ultimate years, the place she privately battled non-small cell lung most cancers. On Friday, Troper mentioned that Susan Wojcicki died at 56.
In an organization recognized for head-scratching quirks, absurd ambitions, and splashy profiles, Wojcicki by some means ducked the largest spotlights whereas taking up gargantuan duties. Even earlier than Eric Schmidt turned Google’s CEO and have become generally known as the grownup within the room, Wojcicki was a peaceful, analytical presence whose sensible counsel and regular work ethic certified her for the corporate’s most important roles, at the same time as Google, later named Alphabet, grew to one of many world’s strongest firms. Within the earliest days, her instructional pedigree–together with a level at Harvard and an MBA from the Anderson College of Administration at UCLA—in addition to her Intel expertise, made her a relative veteran in comparison with the peach-fuzzers in cost. She was additionally actually a member of the household, after cofounder Brin married her sister Ann (they divorced in 2015).
Effectively earlier than Schmidt’s arrival, Wojcicki was lively in steering Google in the direction of profitability. “There was a transition the place we realized that we may make much more cash from the promoting, versus syndicating search on the internet,” she advised me in 2008, in an interview for my history of the company.
