Susan Wojcicki knew she took a leap of faith.
In 1999, while working at Intel, Wojcicki realized that Google, the then upstart search engine, was becoming increasingly essential to her day-to-day life. And that meant the two guys she’d been renting a garage to the year before were onto something.
“I decided I wanted to work for Google, which at the time also was crazy,” she said in her 2014 commencement address at Johns Hopkins University. “With a mortgage to pay and student loans, I’d have to leave a comfortable job at a Fortune 500 company and work for the guys who lived in my garage at a startup with no revenue, a handful of male employees. And also, did I mention I was pregnant? Now, people thought I was the crazy one.”
And though she tells the story with mirth, there’s also an undercurrent of seriousness: It is a genuinely crazy thing to do, becoming the 16th employee at a startup with a weird name. But Wojcicki was a believer—in ideas, in businesses, and in people.
The former YouTube CEO and a vital figure in Google’s development, Wojcicki passed away on Friday at only 56, after a two-year battle with cancer. And, on social media all weekend, grief has been pouring out, clearly visible in the digital landscape she helped create. From Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to the deluge of former and past Googlers, much of Silicon Valley was grieving her loss, an immeasurable one for tech and business as a whole.
Grief may be indomitable, but it’s supposed to be. It’s not meant to be defeated, but survived and eventually accepted into one’s life. But to those of you grieving, I’m sorry—she was clearly an extraordinary leader and person.
Wojcicki even from a distance lived a life that was a reminder of just how much is possible, while still being kind—that how you treat people does matter and is remembered (Pichai remembers her taking him out for ice cream while he was interviewing at Google). I also can’t help but think her career is a reminder of something else—that early startup employees are pretty remarkable.
When pursuing the impossible or the unknown, there’s no substitute for a believer. And as much as Silicon Valley’s devoted to its (sometimes justified) founder myth-making, early employees are also taking a massive leap of faith. These people bet their careers and the trajectory of their lives on an idea and some venture cash.
“Opportunities, the good ones, they’re messy and confusing and hard to recognize,” Wojcicki said in that 2014 commencement speech. “They’re risky, they challenge you. But things happen so fast because our world is changing so much. You have to make decisions without perfect information. You have to make decisions based on the fact that the world is going to continue to change. Believe that the status quo will be supplanted by something better—that someone’s crazy business idea will become real and important. Believe that this technology, however small today, is going to be big in the future.”
An early startup employee has to take a gamble nearly comparable to a founder’s. I truthfully don’t think I’d be brave enough. That takes a special kind of person, with a special kind of faith, in themselves and others.
In Milan Kundera’s 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he writes: “We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. What can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”
Considering Wojcicki’s life, I think the answer really is a lot. By every account I’ve heard, she was someone who managed to do the seemingly impossible: Be a decisive, heliocentric leader, who was distinctly warm, kind—and funny.
“Can you imagine if you wanted to search for something and you had to say, ‘I’m gonna AltaVista the answer?’ That would be kind of awkward,” she laughed to the Johns Hopkins audience in 2014. “Or ‘let’s go Excite that!’ You guys should be grateful to Larry and Sergey for the name alone.”
Sure, thanks Larry and Sergey, but my weekend watching the last of the Olympics on YouTube TV—that was made possible by Wojcicki, whose faith in both Google and herself remade our world.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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Nina Ajemian curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.
VENTURE DEALS
- CloudPay, a London-based payroll and payment service provider, raised $120 million in funding. Blue Owl Capital led the round and was joined by existing investors Rho Capital Partners, The Olayan Group, and Hollyport Capital.
- DevRev, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based AI-native SaaS platform, raised $100.8 million in Series A funding from Khosla Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Dheeraj Pandey’s family office, and others.
- Contextual AI, a Mountain View, Calif.-based automotive AI company, raised $80 million in Series A funding. Greycroft led the round and was joined by existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Lightspeed, Lip-Bu Tan, and others.
- Gaussion, a London-based battery technology company, raised $12 million in Series A funding. Autotech Ventures led the round and was joined by existing investors BGF and UCL Technology Fund.
- InventWood, a Frederick, Md.-based materials producer, raised $8 million in funding from existing investor Grantham Foundation, Builders Vision, Echelon, and others.
- Kano Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based DNA-focused biotech company, raised $5 million in seed funding. The Engine Ventures and VSquared Ventures led the round and were joined by Taihill Venture and Metaplanet.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- Exiger, backed by The Carlyle Group, acquired XSB, a Setauket, N.Y.-based logistics intelligence platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.
- Lindsay Goldberg agreed to acquire a majority stake in Golden State Foods, an Irvine, Calif.-based foodservice and retail industries supplier. Financial terms were not disclosed.
EXITS
- Quantum Capital Group agreed to acquire Cogentrix Energy, a Charlotte, N.C.-based power producer, from The Carlyle Group for approximately $3 billion.
OTHER
- Payoneer acquired Skuad, a Singapore-based workforce and payroll management company, for $61 million in cash.
- Above Food Ingredients agreed to acquire the Crop Food Ingredient Division of The Redwood Group, a Mission, Kan.-based food and feed ingredient supply, grain merchandising, physical and financial energy solutions, and logistics solutions company, for $34 million.
- Five9 agreed to acquire Acqueon, an Irving, Texas-based revenue execution platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.
FUNDS + FUNDS OF FUNDS
- Flint Capital, a Boston, Mass.-based venture capital fund, raised $160 million for its third fund focused on cybersecurity, digital health, fintech, enterprise SaaS, and B2C.
