Former YouTube CEO dies of cancer at 56

San Francisco. Susan Wojcicki, a technology pioneer and former YouTube chief who played a key role in the rise of US giant Google, has died aged 56 after a battle with lung cancer, her husband announced Friday.

“My loving wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us today,” Dennis Troper wrote on his Facebook account, adding that Wojcicki had been living with lung cancer for the past two years.

Wojcicki, one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley, worked for nearly two decades to transform Google from a search engine startup launched in her garage into a global technology giant.

At video-sharing platform YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006, Wojcicki led operations for nearly a decade before stepping down last year to focus on her family, health and personal projects.

“Susan was not only my best friend and life partner, but a brilliant mind, a loving mother and a dear friend to many. Her impact on our family and the world was immeasurable,” her husband said.

Wojcicki was working at Intel when her friends Sergey Brin and Larry Page opened a shop in the garage of her Menlo Park, California, home in 1998. A year later, she joined the company as its 16th employee and first chief marketing officer.

He introduced new forms of advertising and understood that viewers were increasingly turning to the Internet to watch shows and movies.

She was named CEO of YouTube in 2014. She introduced new forms of advertising and helped steer its growth by launching a television streaming service as viewers increasingly turned to the Internet to watch shows and movies.

At Google, he played a key role in creating image search and worked on YouTube buying and the DoubleClick advertising platform.

“She is as central to the Google story as anyone else, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on the social network X.

“She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world, and I am one of countless Googlers who is better for having known her. We will miss her greatly,” he said.