She was later persuaded to depart her job at chip big Intel to affix Google, changing into the agency’s sixteenth worker.
Ms Wojcicki would go on to steer YouTube, the net video sharing firm owned by Google, for 9 years till 2023 when she stepped right down to focus “on my household, well being and private initiatives I am enthusiastic about”.
Ms Wojcicki was considered one of comparatively few ladies to carry a senior position within the expertise trade.
She wished to encourage extra women to enter the sphere, telling the BBC’s Newshour in 2013 that the longer term was going to be “more and more digitally influenced”.
“However then I see there are only a few ladies within the trade,” she mentioned. “General the tech trade has, on common, in all probability about 20% ladies and I additionally have a look at the pipeline of ladies popping out of technical levels and it is vitally small.”
Whereas Ms Wojcicki rose to turn into the boss of YouTube, her tenure was not with out controversy. The platform confronted criticism over its dealing with of on-line disinformation, together with throughout the Covid pandemic.
In 2022, quite a few fact-checking organisations wrote to her accusing YouTube of being “one of many main conduits of on-line disinformation and misinformation worldwide”.
Ms Wojcicki stepped down a 12 months later to deal with her private life and well being.
Asserting her loss of life “with profound unhappiness”, her husband Dennis Troper mentioned: “My beloved spouse of 26 years and mom to our 5 youngsters left us immediately after two years of residing with non-small-cell lung most cancers.”