Susan Wojcicki Biography & Education

Who is Susan Wojcicki?

Susan Diane Wojcicki is a technology professional who is currently the CEO of YouTube, a video-sharing website. After earning a master’s degree in economics from the University of California and a master’s in Business Administration from UCLA Anderson School of Management, Wojcicki began her career as a management consultant at R.B. Webber & Company and Bain & Company. She also worked for Intel’s marketing department. She went on to become Google’s first marketing manager, and her achievements enabled her ascend the corporate ladder to Senior Vice President of Advertising and Commerce. She was in charge of two of Google’s greatest purchases, DoubleClick and YouTube. In 2017, she was rated sixth on Forbes’ list of “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.” She also supports a number of social causes, including promoting coding in schools, combating gender prejudice in the IT industry, expanding paid parental leave, and the Syrian refugee crisis, to name a few.

Childhood & Early Life

• Susan was born in Santa Clara County, California, on July 5, 1968. Her Jewish mother, Esther Wojcicki, worked as an American educator, journalist, and Vice Chairperson of the Creative Commons advisory council, while her Polish American father, Stanley Wojcicki, worked as a physics professor at Stanford University in California.
• Janet Wojcicki, an epidemiologist and anthropologist affiliated with the University of California, and Anne Wojcicki, the founder and CEO of ’23andMe,’ a personal genomics and biotechnology corporation based in California, are her two sisters.
• Susan attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, where she received her education.
• She was a gifted writer who contributed to the school newspaper.
• She started at Harvard University in 1986 and graduated in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in literature and history. She originally intended to pursue a career in academia and thus pursued a PhD in economics. However, After learning about technology, she changed her views.
• She graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a master’s degree in economics in 1993. In 1998, she graduated from UCLA Anderson School of Management with a master’s degree in business administration.

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Career

• Wojcicki began her career as a management consultant at R.B. Webber & Company and afterwards at Bain & Company. She also worked at Intel in the marketing department at its headquarters in Santa Clara, California.
• She donated her Menlo Park garage to her friends Larry Page and Sergey Brin to set up their office in September 1998. On the 4th of that month, an American global technology business specializing in Internet-related products and services was founded.
• She was hired as Google’s first marketing manager in 1999. She began designing services such as Google Images and Google Books, which were released in July 2001 and October 2004 respectively, after working on viral marketing strategies and Google doodle
• Her contributions to Google’s success, which only grew over time, earned her the title of Senior Vice President of Advertising & Commerce.
• She was in charge of Google’s analytic and advertising products, including the online ad service ‘AdWords,’ the freemium web analytics tool ‘Google Analytics,’ and the CPC (cost-per-click) advertising program ‘AdSense.’
• She was then in charge of Google’s video services. As YouTube, a video-sharing website founded by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen in February 2005, began to compete with Google’s video business, Wojcicki proposed acquiring YouTube
  Wojcicki was in charge of Google’s acquisition of YouTube, which was one of the company’s largest takeovers when it paid 1.65 billion dollars for the video-sharing website in November 2006. The next year, she oversaw yet another major Google acquisition, when the company paid $3.1 billion for DoubleClick.
• In February 2014, she was appointed as the CEO of YouTube. Since then, the company’s female employment share has risen from 24 to over 30 percent. She oversaw the introduction of a number of YouTube applications aimed at customers who were interested in music, gaming, or family-related material.
• She also oversaw the launch of YouTube Red, a paid streaming subscription service, and YouTube TV, the video-sharing website’s over-the-top (OTT) internet TV service. According to a company announcement, YouTube added 1.5 billion members in a month, with users spending one billion hours every day on the site
• The policy on videos was tightened once she became the CEO. After a British national newspaper reported that films supporting terrorist groups were easily accessed on YouTube, the video-sharing service enacted additional strict regulations.
• It also claimed that some of its and other private organizations’ advertisements appeared right before the start of the videos.
• Her name was included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in 2015. In one of its issues, the magazine dubbed her “the most powerful woman on the internet.” In the same year, she was placed number 27 on Vanity Fair’s New Establishment list, a popular culture, current affairs, and fashion publication.
• On September 28, 2017, she launched her own YouTube channel and posted her first video, ‘My First Video – Advice From Creators.’ The video was well titled, as it featured footage from a variety of YouTube content makers. The channel currently has around 115,000 subscribers.

Personal Life & Legacy

• In Belmont, California, she married Dennis Troper on August 23, 1998. Wojcicki, a mother of five, is a staunch supporter of paid parental leave.
• She has spoken openly about the importance of striking a balance between career and family life. Prior to her fifth maternity leave, she wrote an op-ed essay for the Wall Street Journal on December 16, 2014, explaining the need of paid maternity leave.
• She is a dual citizen of the United States and Poland.

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Trivia

Sergey Brin, who was married to her sister Anne from 2007 to 2015, was her brother-in-law.

In Their Own Words

Tech is as an incredible force that will change our world in ways we can’t anticipate. If that force is only 20 to 30% women, that is a problem.

Susan Wojcicki