Months before Susan Wojcicki passed away on Friday, her mother Esther Wojcicki recalled what the former YouTube CEO was like as a kid and how she raised her daughters.
“Susan was the most level-headed,” Wojcicki told CNN in May. “She was super easy to take care of, baby and child. It was like she was born being rational. And I thought she was so great that I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll have another one.'”
Then came Janet, whose number one goal as a kid was to beat Susan, Esther said, and then Anne.
Janet is now a professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco, and Anne is the founder and CEO of genetic testing company 23andMe.
A longtime educator at Palo Alto High School and author of the 2019 book How to Raise Successful People: Simple Lessons for Radical Results, the family’s matriarch said her goal as a mother was to empower her daughters and teach them that they could manage any situation they were in.
While they didn’t become student body presidents, they were still independent thinkers and leaders in other ways.
“They weren’t afraid to take a stand, which is what I was hoping for,” she told CNN.
When asked what the secret is to raising successful children, Esther replied that she didn’t have a specific parenting style but instead was more collaborative and took her kids’ opinions into account, such as what to make for dinner and how to make it.
“So they were responsible for a lot of choice and responsible for a lot of doing,” she explained. “They all have little failures, but it’s OK. As a matter of fact, if you don’t fail, you don’t learn. The more you do for your kids, the less empowered they are.”
In an interview with Fortune in 2019, Esther boiled down her parenting approach to the acronym TRICK, which stands for trust, respect, independence, collaboration, and kindness.
She said executives can also learn from TRICK and pointed out that Susan’s former company gives employees a sense of freedom with a policy allowing them to devote themselves to whatever they want for 20% of the time.
“Google turned out to be one of the most creative companies on the planet,” Esther said.
