Tragedy has again struck a famous Silicon Valley family. Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has passed away, according to social media posts by her husband, Dennis Troper, and by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. She was 56.
Wrote Troper on Facebook earlier Friday night, “It is with profound sadness that I share the news of Susan Wojcicki passing. My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non-small cell lung cancer.”
“Susan was not just my best friend and partner in life, but a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to many. Her impact on our family and the world was immeasurable. We are heartbroken, but grateful for the time we had with her. Please keep our family in your thoughts as we navigate this difficult time.”
Non-small cell lung cancer is one of two primary types of lung cancer and the most common kind, according to the Yale School of Medicine. Because its symptoms are often mistaken for common illnesses, 80 percent of people diagnosed with the condition have already progressed to advanced stages, according to a fact sheet associated with the university.
Wojcicki and Troper had separately suffered a heart-breaking loss in February of this year when their 19-year-old son, Marco Troper, died of an accidental overdose in his dorm room at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a freshman.
Wojcicki rose to fame as the CEO of YouTube, a role she held for nine years before stepping down in early 2023, saying in a blog post at the time that she had “decided to start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about.”
Wojcicki was among the first 20 employees of Google, which went on to acquire YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion — what seemed like an astronomical amount at the time. She famously became involved with the company after renting the garage of her Menlo Park, Calif., home to friends Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were Ph.D. students at Stanford at the time. (Google was restructured in 2015, at which point Alphabet became its parent company.)
According to reports over the years, it was after observing the early traction of YouTube that Wojcicki herself — then a marketing manager at Google — proposed to Page and Brin that Google buy the video streaming platform.
Under her leadership, YouTube became a multibillion dollar cash generator for Google. In 2023, YouTube posted $8.1 billion in revenue through ad sales — nearly 10% of Alphabet’s total revenue.
Wojcicki’s family has deep ties to Silicon Valley and to the Bay Area more broadly. One of her sisters is 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki. Another sister, Janet, is a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. Meanwhile, their mother Esther Wojcicki, is a renowned educator who has written extensively on how to raise successful children.
