The nondescript house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, had been vacant for only a few years when I visited in 2008, but the ghosts were still there. This was where Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google a decade ago. Once here was the garage full of newly delivered servers and routers; there were the carpeted rooms at the back of the house where Page, Brin and their first employee, Craig Silverstein, worked out code; through the window was the backyard with the hot tub.
At Google’s inception, the house belonged to a young couple, Dennis Tropper and Susan Wojcicki, who recently bought it for $615,000. To help with the mortgage, the Google duo paid them $1,700 a month to rent unused space. “They came in through the garage,” Wojcicki told me later. “They weren’t allowed in the front door.”
Wojcicki started hanging out with the young founders and was fascinated by the rise of the search startup. She soon joined herself, around the time the 15-person company moved from her house to a real office above a bike shop in Palo Alto. In 2002 she took over Google’s advertising division, eventually leading a multibillion-dollar business that transformed the entire industry. In 2014 she became CEO of the video product company YouTube, running one of the world’s largest media properties and navigating it through competition from other social networks and content moderation crises. Despite being one of the most powerful women in the entire business, she played it low-key, even until her departure in February 2023 “to begin a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects that I am passionate about.” as she wrote on the company’s blog.
That same low-key ethic persisted into her difficult final years as she battled privately with non-small cell lung cancer. On Friday, Tropper said Susan Wojcicki had died at the age of 56.
In a company known for dizzying quirks, absurd ambitions and glamorous profiles, Wojcicki somehow avoided the biggest spotlight while shouldering enormous responsibilities. Even before Eric Schmidt became Google’s CEO and became known as the grown-up in the room, Wojcicki was a calm, analytical presence whose wise counsel and steady work ethic qualified her for the company’s most important roles, even as Google, more later called Alphabet, grew to become one of the most powerful companies in the world. In the early days, her educational pedigree—including a degree from Harvard and an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management—and her experience with Intel made her a relative veteran compared to the fakes in charge. She was also literally part of the family after co-founder Brynn married her sister Anne (they divorced in 2015).
Well before Schmidt’s arrival, Wojcicki was active in guiding Google to profit. “There was a transition where we realized we could make a lot more money from advertising as opposed to syndicating web search,” she told me in 2008. in an interview about my company history.
