Susan Wojcicki, who was Google's 16th employee and led YouTube during a period of explosive growth, has died. She was 56 and had battled non-small cell lung cancer for two years, her husband, Dennis Troper, posted on Facebook. Wojcicki was one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley, CNN reports. She was working for Intel when she rented her garage in Menlo Park, California, to her friends Larry Page and Sergey Brin for $1,700 a month. Page and Brin worked there to create a more intuitive algorithm for internet searches, per the Washington Post.
For nine years, Wojcicki was chief executive of YouTube, whose parent company was Google. Its monthly users roughly doubled during her tenure to more than 2 billion. As social media grew, online platforms faced pressure to do something about the spread of harmful content including misinformation and hate speech. In 2019, told the Times she realized that content moderation was an issue for YouTube. "I own this problem, and I'm going to fix it," she said. Wojcicki stepped down from YouTube last year, telling employees in a letter: "I'm so proud of everything we've achieved. It's been exhilarating, meaningful, and all-consuming."
In a statement after her death, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said, "She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it's hard to imagine the world without her." Sheryl Sandberg, who was a Google executive under Wojcicki, credited her as an influence. "She taught me the business and helped me navigate a growing, fairly chaotic organization at the beginning of my career in tech," Sandberg posted. "She was the person I turned to for advice over and over again." (More obituary stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
