Susan Diane Wojcicki was born in Palo Alto, California, and grew up on the Stanford campus, where her father taught physics. After graduating from Gunn High School, she attended Harvard University, studying history and literature to earn a Ph.D. in economics and pursue an academic career. In 1993, at 25, Wojcicki completed her master’s degree in economics at the University of California, followed by a Master of Business Administration from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. During her studies, she worked as a management consultant in R.B. Webber & Company and Bain & Company and at Intel’s marketing division.
In 1998, at 30, Wojcicki married Dennis Troper, and the couple settled in Menlo Park, California. In that same year, she rented her garage space to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, who turned it into its headquarters. In the following year, Wojcicki joined Google as its first marketing manager and 16th employee. In the beginning, she worked on viral marketing programs, heading products such as AdSense, AdWords, and Google Analytics, before developing new services, such as Google Images and Google Books. Under her direction, Google became the leading company for online display advertising.
In 2006, she initiated and handled the acquisition of YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars, and within two years, she oversaw two of Google’s biggest acquisitions – DoubleClick and AdMob. In 2010, she became senior vice president of AdWords and AdSense.
In 2014, at the age of 46, Wojcicki was named CEO of YouTube. In this position, she is responsible for all the developments of the service, from channel memberships and merchandise to YouTube Premium and YouTube TV, and oversees the website’s localization all over the world. She tightened YouTube’s policy on videos that contain violent and hateful speeches. As a loud advocate against gender discrimination at technology companies, she increased the number of YouTube’s female employees from 24% to 30%.
Along with her role at YouTube, Wojcicki serves on the boards of several organizations, including Salesforce, UCLA Anderson School of Management, and Room to Read, an organization that promotes gender equality in education. Wojcicki is also an activist and involved in numerous social causes, such as the expansion of paid family leave, girls in STEM, and support of Syrian refugees.
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