30 Interesting Things We Bet You Didn't Know About Susan Wojcicki

26 January 2019, 2:39 pm EST By Ruby Karnick

Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube since February 2014, often referred to as the “most important person in advertising,” is an American technology executive, who was also involved in the founding of Google. Here are some little known facts about her:

She has been with Google since the beginning of Google and in fact, Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, initially set up office in her garage in Menlo Park.
She was named as the one among the "100 Most Influential People" by Time magazine in the year 2015. She was also named as the "Most Powerful Woman on the Internet," by the magazine in a later issue.
She was first marketing manager of Google, in the year 1999, when she was four months pregnant. However, she was only the 16th employee of the company.
Though, she was the sixteenth employee of the company, her first decision on her job with Google, was to suggest relocating the company to Mountain View.
She has led the two of Google's largest acquisitions of - YouTube and DoubleClick, which were the $1.65 billion and $3.1 billion purchases in the year 2006 and 2007 respectively.
She is reportedly responsible for the original marketing of Google's search engines, with a budget of zero dollars, which led to what is now the Google's dominance in the search engine sector.
During her tenure as CEO of YouTube, the percentage of female employees in the company has reportedly risen from 24 percent to nearly 30 percent. There are also special parking spots for moms-to-be along with nursing rooms on site, and employees are given 18 weeks of paid parental leave.
Susan Diane Wojcicki was born on July 5, 1968 to Stanley Wojcicki, a Polish American physics professor at Stanford University and Esther Wojcicki, an educator of Russian-Jewish descent.
She has two sisters -Janet Wojcicki, an anthropologist and epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and Anne Wojcicki, founder of 23andMe, who is married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
She went to Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, where she wrote for the school newspaper. She studied history and literature at Harvard University and graduated with honors in the year 1990.

She was actually a humanities major in college, and had taken her first ever computer science class only as a senior. She had intended to get a PhD in economics to pursue a career in academia, but changed her plans after discovering her interest in technology.
Her very first business was actually about marketing, at the age of 11, when she started selling "spice ropes," through the door-to-door marketing technique.
She received her Master's of Science in economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in the year 1993. Five years later, she also received a Master of Business Administration from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Initially, she started her career at the Intel Corporation in Santa Clara, California, where she worked in the marketing department.
She later became a management consultant at the Bain & Company and R.B. Webber & Company, before joining Google, where she took over as the first marketing manager.
She started the search engine marketing by partnering with universities and getting them to include a Google search bar in their official websites.
She has been one of the CEOs to have raised voice for several causes including the plight of Syrian refugees, prioritizing coding in schools, and gender discrimination at technology companies.
She also holds a Polish citizenship, as her grandfather Franciszek Wójcicki was a People's Party and Polish People's Party politician. He was an elected MP during the Polish legislative election, 1947.
It was Wojcicki who came up with the idea of adapting Google's AdWords into the self-service platform. In fact, her first big success was with the launch of Google AdWords, initially appearing on the Google search pages.
However, this led to Google becoming a broker of online display advertisements, especially with her paving way to AdSense system and the acquisition of Applied Semantics in the year 2003.

In the year 2006, when she was heading the Google's original video service, observing the success of YouTube, a prominent competitor of the Google Video, she proposed and led the acquisition of YouTube.
She, as CEO of YouTube, implemented several stringent policies on videos, following a British national newspaper mentioning that videos supporting terrorist groups were found easily on the website.
In her career with Google, she has been a part of the development of successful products including Google Doodles, Google Images, Google Books, Google Analytics.
She had held various positions in different departments with Google, before becoming the Senior Vice President of Advertising & Commerce in the year 2010. She was moved to YouTube and was made the CEO of the video-sharing giant in 2014.
She, as the CEO of YouTube, oversaw the release of YouTube's advertisement-free subscription service, YouTube Premium as well as the over-the-top (OTT) internet television service YouTube TV.
She criticized Article 13 of the European Union Copyright Directive as she felt it to be a threat to content creators' ability to share their work, on October 22, 2018. According to the Article 13, YouTube would have the sole responsibility of removing copyrighted content.
Despite having a very tight schedule as the CEO of YouTube, she makes it a point to reach home at 6 p.m. every night to be a part of their family meal. She also believes that this thought helps her in being more effective CEO.
She married Dennis Trooper in Belmont California on August 23, 1998. The couple have five children. It was during her fifth pregnancy that she wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal explaining the importance of paid maternity leave, on December 16, 2014.
She has been constantly listed in the Forbes list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women, since 2015. She was ranked #10 on the Fortune's list of Most Powerful Women in the year 2018. She was at #41 on the Forbes list of America's Self-Made Women as of January 2019.
She advocates for federally mandated, paid parental leave, which she hopes will increase the number of women participating in the workforce.