The simple house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, had only been vacant for a few years when I visited in 2008, but the ghosts were still there. Here’s where Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google a decade ago. There was the garage that was once filled with newly delivered servers and routers; there were the carpeted rooms in the back of the house where Page, Brin, and their first employee, Craig Silverstein, wrote code; outside the window was a backyard with a hot tub.
In Google’s early days, the house belonged to a young couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had recently purchased it for $615,000. To help with the mortgage, the Google duo paid them $1,700 a month to rent the unused space. “They came in through the garage,” Wojcicki later told me. “They weren’t allowed in the front door.”
Wojcicki found herself hanging out with young founders and was fascinated by the rise of the search startup. She soon joined the company, which had grown to 15 people and moved out of her house and into a real office, above a bicycle shop in Palo Alto. In 2002, She took over Google’s advertising division.eventually becoming CEO of a multibillion-dollar business that transformed the entire industry. In 2014, she became CEO of the company’s YouTube video product, running one of the world’s largest media properties and navigating through competition with other social networks and content moderation crises. Despite being one of the most powerful women in any business, she remained low-key, even until she left in February 2023, “to begin a new chapter focused on family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about,” as she wrote on the company blog.
That humble ethos persisted into her difficult final years, as she battled non-small cell lung cancer. On Friday, Troper said Susan Wojcicki died at 56.
In a company known for its quirky quirks, implausible ambitions, and flashy profiles, Wojcicki has somehow managed to avoid the spotlight while taking on enormous responsibilities. Even before Eric Schmidt became CEO of Google and became known as the adult in the room, Wojcicki was a calm, analytical person whose sound advice and strong work ethic qualified her to take on the company’s most important roles, even as Google, later renamed Alphabet, grew into one of the most powerful companies in the world. In the early days, her academic background—which included a degree from Harvard and an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA—as well as her experience at Intel made her a relative veteran of the company’s more established women. She’s also very much a family person, as co-founder Brin married his sister Ann (they divorced in 2015).
Before Schmidt arrived, Wojcicki was actively steering Google toward profitability. “There was a shift where we realized we could make more money from advertising, as opposed to providing web search,” she told me in 2008, in an interview for my company history.
