By Mrinmay Dey
(Reuters) – Former YouTube chief executive and longtime Google executive Susan Wojcicki died on Saturday at the age of 56 after a two-year battle with lung cancer.
“It is with profound sadness that I share the news of the passing of Susan Wojcicki. My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us today after two years of living with non-small cell lung cancer,” Wojcicki's husband Dennis Troper said in a facebook post (NASDAQ:).
“Over the past two years, even as she faced great personal hardship, Susan dedicated herself to improving the world through her philanthropy, including supporting research into the disease that ultimately took her life,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post.
Wojcicki, one of the most prominent women in tech, joined Google in 1999, becoming one of the search engine's first employees, years before it acquired YouTube.
Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion.
Prior to becoming YouTube CEO in 2014, Wojcicki was senior vice president of advertising products at Google.
After nine years at the helm of the company, Wojcicki will step down from her role at YouTube in 2023 to focus on “family, health and personal projects.” She was replaced by her deputy, Neal Mohan, a senior advertising and product executive who joined Google in 2008. At the time, Wojcicki was set to take on an advisory role at Alphabet (NASDAQ:), Google’s parent company.
“Twenty-five years ago I made the decision to join a pair of Stanford graduate students who were developing a new search engine. Their names were Larry and Sergey… It would be one of the best decisions of my life,” Wojcicki wrote in a blog post the day she left YouTube, referring to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
“Today at YouTube we lost a teammate, mentor and friend, Susan Wojcicki,” Mohan said in a post on x.
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