While the mass fame and appeal of some other tech-head honchos has eluded Youtube CEO, that did not stop the Times Magazine to call Susan Wojcicki the most powerful woman on the internet.
Starting in Google as the first marketing manager in 1999, it was none other than Wojcicki who proposed the acquisition of YouTube by Google in 2006 which was then just a video startup. Her academic journey and her rise to success also make for a damn interesting story.
Starting with honours in history and literature from Harvard, Susan had originally planned on pursuing a career in academia, but she changed her plans when she fell in love with technology. "I realized, wow, this is really interesting," she says. "I realized, oh, I can make things, I can sell things, I can have influence. And then when the Internet came out, you could reach people all over the world. I mean, that was just amazing," she explained in one interview.
The great leap in her career came in 1998 while she was working in the marketing department of Intel and was four months pregnant. In a fateful turn of events, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, rented Wojcicki’s and her husband’s garage while they were creating their big masterpiece.
Seeing the passion and potential in the duo’s project, Wojcicki quit her steady job and joined the Google bandwagon as their 16th employee and first marketing manager.
With her sharp talent, she managed to market their search engine services with a budget of exactly zero dollars. She started partnering with universities to have them include their search bar in their websites and everything grew from there. She also took part in the development of successful contributions such as the Google Doodles, Google Images and Google Books. She grew inside the company and ended up becoming senior vice president of Advertising & Commerce leading products like AdSense, DoubleClick, Google Analytics and AdWords.
During her time as VP, she handled two of Google's largest acquisitions: the $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube in 2006 and the $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick in 2007. She has been the Chief Executive Officer of YouTube since February 2014.
