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susan wojcicki

Susan Wojcicki

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki steps down after nine years

On Thursday, Susan Wojcicki, the Chief Executing Officer of YouTube, announced her departure in a blog post after nine years in charge of the world’s most popular online video website.

chief product officer of YouTube, Neal Mohan, will take over as CEO, she officially confirmed. Wojcicki is currently 54 and was originally a senior vice president for brand promotion at Google prior to actually taking over as Chief executive officer of YouTube in the year 2014. Wojcicki worked briefly at Intel as well as Bain & Company prior to joining Google.

Susan Wojcicki
Image Source: reuters.com

Today, after nearly 25 years here, I’ve decided to step back from my role as the head of YouTube and start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about,” said Wojcicki.

Source: theguardian.com

Susan Wojcicki will be recalled as Google’s first owner, despite being among the highly regarded female executives in this male-dominated technology sector.

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Wojcicki loaned the garage of her Menlo Park, California which is the home to Co-founders of Google Larry Page & Sergey Brin for 1,700 USD per month fairly soon after they integrated their web browser into a firm in 1998.

Page and Brin both were 25 at the time and spent five months refining their search engine in Wojcicki’s garage prior to actually shifting Google into a larger and official office and afterward convincing their previous landlord to consider working for them.

It would be one of the best decisions of my life,” Wojcicki wrote in the announcement of her departure.

Source: theguardian.com

she will indeed remain with YouTube momentarily to assist in the shift of management, and in the long run had also consented with Chief Executive Officer, Sundar Pichai, to consider taking an advisory position all over Google & Alphabet, providing “counsel and guidance”.

Also Read: Elon Musk Forced Algorithm Change to Help Boost His Tweets

Susan Wojcicki is the newest in a long line of highly advanced Technology executives to leave their positions, with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos stepping down from his position in 2021, CEO of Pinterest Ben Silbermann having left in 2022 as well as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg resigning in 2022. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was also fired in 2022 as an aspect of Elon Musk’s takeover of the firm.

YouTube has been dealing with the recent resurgence of TikTok, a brief video app that surpassed the Google-owned video streaming service in screen time at the end of 2022.

Susan Wojcicki : The Second Chief Executive Officer of YouTube

From being a mother of five children to making a name in the list of the Most Powerful Women of biggest forums like Forbes and Fortune, Susan Wojcicki has become an inspirational example of women empowerment. A part-time painter, doodler, and a scholar from the University of California, Wojcicki is responsible for Google’s most beneficial deal- YouTube. The current CEO of YouTube oversaw the potential of the user-uploaded content, and convinced Google’s board members, to give her idea the green light, and steal the deal.

Early Life

Susan Wojcicki was born on 5 July 1968, to a physics professor, Stanley Wojcicki, and Esther Wojcicki, an educator, in Santa Clara, California. Her father served at the Stanford University, so she along with her two sisters, Janet Wojcicki and Anne Wojcicki, spent most of their childhood in the university campus.

Susan Wojcicki
Image Source: flickr.com

Wojcicki completed her high school from Gunn High School, Palo Alto, California. In 1990, she graduated from the Harvard University with primary subjects, history and literature. Later, she attended the University of California, to pursue a master’s degree in economics, followed by an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

During her graduation, Wojcicki took Computers as a subject and grew an interest in it. Her interest led her to drop the long-term plan of pursuing a career as an educator and choose a career in the technical field.

Early Career & Joining Google

After her MBA, Wojcicki started working in the marketing team at Intel in Santa Clara, California, in 1999. Later, she became the management consultant at Bain & Company and R.B. Webber & Company. In the year 1998, the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, used Susan’s garage in Menlo Park, as their first Google office. In 1999, she joined Google as the first marketing manager and the 16th employee of Google. She was also among the first Google Doodle team and has been a part of Google’s most important projects, like Google Images, AdWords, DoubleClick, and Google Books.

Wojcicki continued working in the marketing department of Google, becoming the senior vice president of Advertising & Commerce department of Google. In 2007, Google acquired DoubleClick by paying $3.1 billion, on the suggestion of Wojcicki.

CEO of YouTube

During the rise of YouTube, Wojcicki foresaw the scope of it and advised Google to take over it, merging the Google Video into it. Hence in 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. Within less than a decade of the acquisition of YouTube, YouTube valued at $160 billion, 100 times more than the initial investment of Google.

In February 2014, Wojcicki was appointed as the second CEO of YouTube. After she became the CEO, the number of logged in users per month raised to 1.9 billion, watching videos on it one billion hours a day. Her leadership rose, up to 30% female employees in the YouTube office. She also imposed some policies on the content of YouTube to prevent hate speech and violent extremism.

Personal life

On August 23, 1998, in Belmont, California, Wojcicki got married to Dennis Troper. The two are parents of five children. Wojcicki and Dennis Troper move philanthropy through the Troper Wojcicki Foundation. She has been a supporter of Women’s computer education. She even advocated for the paid maternity leaves for women and gender discrimination. In 2017, Wojcicki was ranked at number 6 in the list of Forbes World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.