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Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has died at the age of 56

Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube and one of Silicon Valley’s most influential female executives, died Friday after battling lung cancer for two years, the company said.

Wojcicki, who was 56 years old, resigned from his CEO position at YouTube last year after more than two decades at the head of various parts Google and its parent company Alphabet.

“Even as I write this, it seems impossible that this is true,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a note to employees on Friday. published on the company’s website.

“Her loss is devastating for all of us who know and love her, for the thousands of Googlers she led over the years, and for the millions of people around the world who looked up to her, benefited from her dedication and leadership, and felt the impact of the incredible things she created at Google, YouTube, and beyond.”

Wojcicki was a key figure at Google from the beginning, when she rented her Palo Alto garage to founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Soon after, she quit her job at the chipmaker Intel and joined the young search engine startup, where she became its first marketing manager in 1999. Over the years, she was responsible for Google’s advertising and video businesses and played a key role in transforming the company from a startup into today’s $2 trillion technology giant.

The Wojcicki family became known as a kind of Silicon Valley elite. Wojcicki’s sister Anne, the founder and CEO of the genetic testing company 23andMe, was once married to Google co-founder Brin. Their mother Esther founded the journalism program at Palo Alto High School, in the cradle of the technology industry, and was awarded at Digital Learning Day 2012 by then-US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan for the effective use of technology in the classroom.

Wojcicki’s husband Dennis Troper, who works as a product manager at Google, wrote in a on facebook. On Friday, Troper posted that Wojcicki had been suffering from “non-small cell lung cancer” for two years. “Susan was not only my best friend and partner, but she was a brilliant mind, a loving mother and a dear friend to many,” Troper wrote.

As YouTube’s CEO, Wojcicki led one of the world’s largest media sites, with audiences streaming more than a billion hours of video every day. The video site, which Wojcicki bought from Google in 2006, brought in $8.7 billion in advertising revenue in the second quarter. During the nine years Wojcicki led YouTube as CEO, she made the video site a reliable player in a changing market while also struggling with… not always successful – the rampant spread of disinformation.

In an interview with Assets Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell At the 2022 World Economic Forum in Davos, Wojcicki discussed the challenges of regulating the content published on the website and recommended to users.

“When it comes to sensitive topics such as news, health or science, we make sure our recommendations come from a trusted, well-known and reliable publisher,” she said.

She also addressed important issues affecting women in the workplace, including the U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning the Roe v. Wade Decision that guarantees women the right to abortion.

“My position is that women should have a choice when they become mothers. I think that’s really important. I believe that reproductive rights are human rights and that to take away a law and a right that we’ve had for almost 50 years would be a huge setback for women. But that’s my personal view,” she said. “As we run a company that really focuses on free speech, we want to make sure that we allow for a wide range of opinions and that everyone has the right to express their point of view as long as it complies with our community guidelines.”

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