Susan Wojcicki

Susan Diane Wojcicki (born July 5, 1968) is an American technology executive. She has been the chief executive officer of YouTube since February 2014. She is from Los Altos, California, and has a net worth of $480 million.

Early life and education
Wojcicki is the daughter of Esther Wojcicki, an educator of Russian-Jewish descent, and Stanley Wojcicki, a Polish Americans|Polish American physics professor at Stanford University. She has two sisters: Janet Wojcicki, (PhD, anthropologist and epidemiologist) and Anne Wojcicki, founder of 23andMe. She grew up on the Stanford campus with George Dantzig as a neighbor. She attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, and wrote for the school newspaper.

Wojcicki's first business was selling "spice ropes" door-to-door at age 11. A humanities major in college, she took her first computer science class as a senior.

Wojcicki studied history and literature at Harvard University and graduated with honors in 1990. She originally planned on getting a PhD in economics and pursuing a career in academia but changed her plans when she discovered an interest in technology.

She also received her Master's of Science in economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993 and a Master of Business Administration from the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 1998.

Career
In September 1998, the same month that Google was incorporated, its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up office in Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, California|Menlo Park. Before becoming Google's first marketing manager in 1999, Wojcicki worked in marketing at Intel in Santa Clara, California, and was a management consultant at Bain & Company and R.B. Webber & Company. At Google, she worked on the initial viral marketing programs, as well as the first Google Doodles. Wojcicki also took part in the development of successful contributions to Google such as Google Images and Google Books.

Wojcicki grew within Google to become senior vice president of Advertising & Commerce and lead the advertising and analytic products, including AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Analytics.

YouTube, then a small start-up, was successfully competing with Google's Google Video service, overseen by Wojcicki. Her response was to propose the purchase of YouTube.

She handled two of Google’s largest acquisitions — the $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube in 2006 and the $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick in 2007.

CEO of YouTube
In February 2014 she became the CEO of YouTube.

Wojcicki, called "the most important person in advertising", was named to Time (magazine)|Time's 100 most influential people in 2015 and described in a later issue of Time as “the most powerful woman on the Internet”.

In the time that Wojcicki has been CEO of YouTube, the company announced that it had reached 1.5 billion logged-in users a month and that users were watching one billion hours a day. Since taking on the role of CEO, YouTube’s percentage of female employees has risen from 24 to nearly 30 percent.

Wojcicki also oversaw the development and release of new YouTube applications and experiences designed to cater to users interested in family gaming, and music content. She also oversaw the launch of YouTube’s advertisement-free subscription service, YouTube Red, and its Over-the-top media services|over-the-top (OTT) internet television service YouTube TV.

During her tenure, YouTube has tightened its policy on videos it regards as potentially violating its policies on hate speech and violent extremism. The more stringent policies came after The Times showed that "ads sponsored by the British government and several private sector companies had appeared ahead of YouTube videos supporting terrorist groups" and several large advertisers withdrew their ads from YouTube in response. The enforcement policies have been criticized as censorship.

Personal life
Wojcicki married Dennis Troper on August 23, 1998, in Belmont, California. They have five children. On December 16, 2014, ahead of taking her fifth maternity leave, Wojcicki wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the importance of paid maternity leave. She is often quoted talking about the importance of finding balance between family and career.

In addition to her US citizenship she is a Polish citizen. Her grandfather, Franciszek Wójcicki, was a People's Party (Poland)|People's Party and Polish People's Party (1945–49)|Polish People's Party politician who had been elected MP during the Polish legislative election, 1947.

Advocacy
Wojcicki has been an advocate for several causes, including the expansion of paid family leave, the plight of Syrian refugees, countering gender discrimination at technology companies, getting girls interested in computer science and prioritizing coding in schools.

Awards
Wojcicki was named #1 on the Adweek Top 50 Execs list in 2013, which recognizes the top media executives within an organization. She was named #27 on Vanity Fair (magazine)|Vanity Fair's New Establishment list in 2015.

In 2017, Wojcicki ranked #6 on Forbes list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women.

Wojcicki is currently ranked #41 on Forbes list of America's Self-Made Women.