Susan Wojcicki, MBA '98

From 2014 to 2023, she ran YouTube as CEO, cementing the video service’s status as a daily destination for billions of people and a stage for countless performers to launch careers. Before that, Wojcicki spent years managing systems that let virtually any digital publisher cash in on advertisements — and placed Google firmly at the center of the profitable enterprise...

Wojcicki spent much of her tenure working to put safeguards in place and address concerns from sponsors, creators and regulators...

Wojcicki studied history at Harvard University, then worked as a photojournalist in India. Within a few years she returned to California to receive advanced degrees in economics and business before taking a marketing role with Intel Corp.

During that stint at Intel, a friend connected her with Sergey Brin and Larry Page, then Stanford doctoral students looking for space to house their internet search upstart, Google.com. Wojcicki had purchased a home in Menlo Park, a town just north of Stanford. In 1998, she gave Brin and Page space in her garage, which became Google’s first office.

Decades later, Wojcicki confessed that she was initially skeptical of Google, since established search engines such as Yahoo and AltaVista seemed to have a lock on web surfing. Google quickly proved her wrong. She would call renting out her garage “one of the best decisions of my life.”

In 1999, Wojcicki joined the company as its 16th employee and first marketing manager, though Brin and Page didn’t give her a budget to promote their website. “It was a little overwhelming,” she recalled years later.

But Wojcicki’s deeper influence came from her standing at Google, the unconventional search engine that transformed the web and Silicon Valley and is now part of Alphabet. Google’s first marketer and first landlord, she was trusted by Page and Brin, technical visionaries with little interest in management.

Wojcicki pushed to get Google.com inside colleges, helped redesign the company’s original logo to remove its exclamation point and shaped much of its corporate culture. As the first employee to have a child at the company, she authored its parental leave policy, something the male programmers atop the company hadn’t considered.