“She was just a good person”: YouTube community reacts to death of former CEO Susan Wojcicki

The death of YouTube‘s former CEO has inspired a wave of condolences throughout the creator and tech worlds. Susan Wojcicki, who led the Google-owned video hub between 2014 and 2023, passed away on August 9 at the age of 56.

Dennis Troper, Wojcicki’s husband, announced her death on Facebook. The cause of death was lung cancer.

Wojcicki was Google’s 16th employee and a trailblazer for women in tech

Her career at the Mountain View tech giant began when Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page set up shop in her garage in Menlo Park, California. During her first decade at the company, Wojcicki held several high-level roles. She was the first product manager for Google AdSense and played a pivotal role in the development of Google Video, which competed with YouTube before Google’s acquisition of the popular video sharing platform.

Wojcicki’s complemented her technical know-how with savvy people skills. In the book Like, Comment, Subscribe, former Google director Kim Scott described Wojcicki as a “Larry whisperer” who knew how to get Google’s co-founder to “see reason.” As her company encountered a decade of crises and roadblocks, she remained calm. “You could never get Susan rattled, no matter how challenging the moment was,” said Google sales director Patrick Keane in Like, Comment, Subscribe.

Current Google CEO Sundar Pichai remembered Wojcicki’s affability and welcoming nature in a statement he provided upon her passing. “Susan always put others first, both in her values and in the day-to-day. I’ll never forget her kindness to me as a prospective ‘Noogler’ 20 years ago,” Pichai wrote. “During my Google interview, she took me out for an ice cream and a walk around campus. I was sold—on Google and Susan.”

Some of her other contemporaries, including Melinda Gates and Sheryl Sandberg, praised her as a trailblazer for women in tech. “She was the person I turned to for advice over and over again,” Sandberg wrote. “And she was this person for so many others too.”

As CEO of YouTube, Wojcicki championed creators

When she took over YouTube’s top role in 2014, the platform was in the midst of a difficult moment. Her predecessor, Salar Kamangar, had only rarely offered public comments on the platform’s plans. A $100 million investment in original content had stalled, and efforts to promote YouTube’s creator community had been disjointed.

Wojcicki immediately resolved to change the platform’s reputation. “Like Salar, Susan has a healthy disregard for the impossible and is excited about improving YouTube in ways that people will love,” Page said in a statement that accompanied Wojcicki’s promotion.

Despite Wojcicki’s efforts to improve YouTube, her tenure was marked by several bumpy moments, including the 2017 Adpocalypse

and a so-so record with original content. But even as her popularity fluctuated among creators, she always drew respect with her compassionate demeanor. “Really sad hearing the news of Susan Wojcicki’s passing. She was always incredibly sweet and kind whenever I met her,” gamer Jacksepticeye wrote on X. “She always listened to the concerns of YouTubers for the platform and really seemed to care about it.”

Her investments in creators included billboards that introduced rising stars like Lilly Singh to the masses. She rewarded YouTube’s biggest stars with series orders and programming deals; at the same time, she worked to legitimize creator content as the next evolution of TV.

“We look at the next generation, they are completely changing the way they watch TV,” Wojcicki said in a 2016 appearance alongside Grace Helbig. “They watch Grace and all of Grace’s contemporaries.”

In his remembrance of Wojcicki, Matthew “MatPat” Patrick commended her as both “a good person” and a canny executive. “She had the thankless job trying to steer YouTube through some of its toughest years as advertisers bailed, governments regulated, and creators were unhappy about the platform ‘growing up,'” Patrick wrote on X. “Were all the decisions perfect? No. But the fact that YouTube still exists today for creators is a testament to her threading an impossible needle.”

The passing of the torch

In February 2023, YouTube announced that Wojcicki would step down from her CEO role, with YouTube’s product chief Neal Mohan replacing her. At the time, she did not publicly reveal that she was already living with cancer. Instead, she handed to keys to YouTube to a trusted deputy who had come to Google after his company DoubleClick was folded into the Wojcicki-led AdSense unit.

“I had the good fortune of meeting Susan 17 years ago, when she was the architect of the DoubleClick acquisition,” Mohan wrote in a social media post. “Her legacy lives on in everything she touched at Google and YouTube.”

Her time post-YouTube was marked by personal tragedies, including the deaths of both her father Stanley and her son Marco. But as her personal health deteriorated, her legacy took shape. Wojcicki was a thinker, leader, and trailblazer who took decisive actions at YouTube and propped up its community of creators.

When she stepped down from the CEO role, Pichai wrote that she had set YouTube up for its “next decade of success.” Even after her death, that successful period is rolling on.