Susan’s paternal grandfather Franciszek was a Polish lawyer and Member of Parliament after 1947 legislative election. Later he was prosecuted by communist authorities. His wife Janina was a librarian at the Library of Congress responsible for building the largest collection of Polish publications in the U.S. Susan Wojcicki ‘s father Stanisław was born in Warsaw in 1937. At the age of 12 he fled from communist Poland with his mother and brother to Sweden and finally to USA to became physics professor at Stanford and Berkeley.
Susan was born in Santa Clara in 1968 and grew up at Stanford campus. Her first business was selling “spice ropes” door-to-door at the age of eleven. She studied history and literature at Harvard, received MS in economics at the University of California and MBA at UCLA Anderson School of Management. She planned economics PhD and academic career but changed her plans when she discovered her interest in technology.
In 1998 she got married and the same year Google was incorporated by co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who rented Susan’s garage in Menlo Park, CA, for the company office for $1.700 a month plus free Internet for Susan. Later they converted her three small ground-floor bedrooms into additional workspaces to accommodate their growing team. Susan was working at Intel in Santa Clara and in 1999 became Google’s employee no. 16 as the first marketing manager responsible for online advertising business and original video service. She worked on the initial viral marketing programs, helped create the company’s longtime logo and launched the first Google Doodles. Finally she was promoted to Google’s senior vice president of advertising & commerce and oversaw such advertising and analytical products as AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Analytics.
In the beginning of 21 century a small startup YouTube was successfully competing with Google Video service overseen by Susan. In 2006 she recommended and subsequently managed purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion. In 2014 she became YouTube CEO and was soon ranked no. 1 on Adweek Top 50 Execs list that recognized media top executives. Next year Adweek named her “the most important person in advertising” and Time “the most powerful woman on the Internet”, recognizing her among Time’s 100 most influential people of the year.
After Susan became the CEO, YouTube reached 2 billion users a month who were watching 1 billion hours of content a day. In 2020 the company reported over 100 billion hours of global gaming content. It has developed 10 forms of monetization for creators, including channel memberships, merchandise, BrandConnect and paid digital goods like Super Chat, so by 2021 it paid over $30 billion to creators, artists, and media companies. It also launched YouTube’s advertisement-free subscription service, YouTube Premium (formerly known as YouTube Red) and its over-the-top (OTT) internet television service YouTube TV. In 2022 YouTube surpassed 80 million Music and Premium subscribers. The company also launched YouTube Shorts, its short-form video experience, which surpassed 50 billion daily views in 2023. Now there are localized versions of YouTube in 100 countries around the world in 80 languages.
Besides management Susan was active in various media. She was writing articles for renowned newspapers and websites, was present on Twitter and appeared on television. She emphasized educational content as a priority for its company and initiated YouTube Learning to invest in grants and promotion supporting education-focused creator content. She was also engaged in #SaveYourInternet campaign against the European Union’s interference in electronic copyrights, like article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive making YouTube directly liable for copyrighted content and threatening creators’ ability to share their work.
She was also an advocate for several other causes, like the expansion of paid family leave, the plight of Syrian refugees, getting girls interested in computer science and prioritizing computer programming and coding in schools. She owned a real estate holding company that worked on the sustainable growth of Los Altos, CA. Besides her American citizenship she also held Polish citizenship and passport through her father. In 2017 she met with the Polish President Andrzej Duda in Poland who honoured her with the title of the Ambassador of Polishness and awarded with the presidential Polish national flag. In 2020 at the World Economic Forum in Davos she met with the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who turned out to be her remote cousin. In 2023 she was ranked 13th on Forbes Top 100 Poles with net assets estimated at over $800 million.
Yet, that year she announced her resignation from work at YouTube to focus on “family, health, and personal projects”. As mother of five children she was often quoted talking about the importance of finding the balance between family and career. She died on 9 August 2024 at the age of 56 after battling lung cancer for two years and after having proliferated IT industry for over twenty years. She was awarded with high ranks:
Forbes: #7 the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women 2018
Fortune: #10 the Most Powerful Women 2018
Vanity Fair: #1 New Establishment 2019
Forbes: #32 America’s Self-Made Women 2023
