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Susan Wojcicki, the previous boss of YouTube and considered one of Google’s earliest workers, has died aged 56.
Google’s chief govt Sundar Pichai introduced that Ms Wojcicki had handed away after two years of dwelling with lung most cancers.
Mr Pichai, who can be the boss of Google’s father or mother firm Alphabet, stated on X/Twitter he was “unbelievably saddened” and Ms Wojcicki was “as core to the history of Google as anyone”.
Once described because the “most important Googler you’ve never heard of”, Ms Wojcicki was current on the firm’s beginnings when, in 1998, she rented out her Menlo Park storage to the search engine agency’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
She was later persuaded to go away her job at chip big Intel to affix Google, turning into the agency’s sixteenth worker.
Ms Wojcicki would go on to steer YouTube, the web video sharing firm owned by Google, for 9 years till 2023 when she stepped right down to focus “on my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about”.
Ms Wojcicki was considered one of comparatively few ladies to carry a senior position within the know-how business.
She needed to encourage extra women to enter the sector, telling the Daily News’s Newshour in 2013 that the longer term was going to be “increasingly digitally influenced”.
“But then I see there are very few women in the industry,” she stated. “Overall the tech industry has, on average, probably about 20% women and I also look at the pipeline of girls coming out of technical degrees and it is very small.”
While Ms Wojcicki rose to turn into the boss of YouTube, her tenure was not with out controversy. The platform confronted criticism over its dealing with of on-line disinformation, together with in the course of the Covid pandemic.
In 2022, quite a few fact-checking organisations wrote to her accusing YouTube of being “one of the major conduits of online disinformation and misinformation worldwide”.
Ms Wojcicki stepped down a 12 months later to give attention to her private life and well being.
Announcing her dying “with profound sadness”, her husband Dennis Troper stated: “My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after two years of living with non-small-cell lung cancer.”
