Fortune Archives: The great feat Susan Wojcicki pulled off at YouTube

Silicon Valley luminaries who come off as self-satisfied know-it-alls on social media are in ample supply. Then there are the tech leaders who manage to build huge businesses without getting supersized egos.

That was Susan Wojcicki, employee No. 16 at Google, and later YouTube’s CEO. She died of lung cancer at the age of 56 just over a week ago.

Fortune wrote about Wojcicki and her leadership many times during her career. We even interviewed her mother, Esther Wojcicki, about raising leaders like her three daughters: Susan’s sisters Janet and Anne Wojcicki are, respectively, a professor and the founder and CEO of genetic testing company 23andMe. 

In 2021, we chronicled YouTube’s transformation under Wojcicki’swatch into an entertainment and advertising juggernaut with more than $20 billion in annual revenue. “But what really has Wall Street salivating,” Aaron Pressman wrote in that feature, “is the question of just how big it might get.”

I’m hardly ruining the suspense by revealing that YouTube has, in fact, become substantially bigger since the article was published. By last year, its ad revenue had soared to $31.5 billion.

Much of YouTube’s massive growth came during Wojcicki’s tenure as CEO, from 2014 until she stepped down from the role last year. In that time, YouTube evolved well beyond its amateurish roots—remember all the cat and skateboarding videos?—into a giant library of often professional-quality clips by full-time creators, some of whom earn millions of dollars annually from the service. 

Of course, Wojcicki had her share of challenges in growing YouTube. In 2017 big advertisers, tired of their marketing messages appearing alongside videos filled with racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, launched a boycott. Wojcicki took this seriously, investing heavily in automated filters and hiring thousands of workers to block content that didn’t meet the company’s terms of service. Her efforts didn’t fully fix the problem, but she managed to quell the uprising and bring most advertisers back.

Wojcicki also played a key role in Google’s origin story. The details are classic Silicon Valley, as described in Fortune’s article:

In 1998, while working at Intel, Susan famously rented her garage to Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. It wasn’t because she had a clue they would be so successful, she says. “I wanted the rent because I needed the money to pay my mortgage.”

Wojcicki later quit her steady job at Intel to join a nascent Google, led its ad business, and then was the first to suggest to Brin and Page that they buy the video streaming platform YouTube. The $1.65 billion price tag for the less-than-one-year-old startup seemed hefty in 2006, but it ended up being among the best acquisitions in Silicon Valley history.