For many millions around the world, Susan Wojcicki was a person who was a tech executive on the level of a Steve Jobs or a Steve Wozniak, people who built multibillion dollar businesses out of their homes.
For Wojcicki, the opportunity came when she rented her empty garage to a pair of young men named Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and wound up being the site of incorporation of a business called Google. In the subsequent quarter-century, Google has become more than just a search engine. It has become a tool, a collaborative space, and has even become a verb.
But when I knew Susan, she was a photographer at my college newspaper, an affable woman with a ready smile. I’m sure that served her well as Google’s business kept building, and building, and building, Google acquired technologies, created ideas, and developed partnerships.
Wojcick became the CEO of YouTube ten years ago, and helped build the company in many metrics, including paid subscribers, number of hours of videos watched, and number of users logged in (over 2 billion per month).
I’m a proud user of YouTube. I recognized early on that it would be an incredible tool to bring viewers to the game of field hockey through short stories. I’m especially proud of the one I did called The Unwanted Retrievers, a story on the club team at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, which had formed a year after the varsity program was cut in 2006.
I’ve also used YouTube to do short videos, especially ones which rebroadcast our Unfiltered series.
Last week’s news that Wojcicki died from lung cancer hit me hard. She was a good and kind person who was dedicated to the craft of journalism.
She’s one of a growing number of people from my days at the paper who have passed away, far too soon. I’m really going to miss her.
