Susan Wojcicki, former CEO of YouTube, dies at 56

Susan Wojcicki, a leading technology executive who helped shape Google American actress and YouTuber has died at the age of 56, her husband said.

Wojcicki played a key role in creating Google and served for nine years as CEO of YouTube, Step down Last year she decided to focus on her “family, health and personal projects that I’m passionate about,” she said at the time.

She was one of the most respected female executives in the male-dominated tech industry.

Her collaboration with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin The partnership began shortly after their search engine was incorporated into a company in 1998. Wojciechowski rented her garage in Menlo Park, California, for $1,700 a month, cementing a formative partnership. Page and Brin—both 25 at the time—continued to refine their search engine in Wojciechowski’s garage for five months before moving Google to a more formal office and later convincing the former landlord to come work for their company.

“Her loss is devastating for all of us who knew and loved her, for the thousands of Googlers she led over the years, and for the millions of people around the world who looked up to her, benefited from her advocacy and leadership, and felt the impact of the amazing things she built at Google, YouTube, and beyond,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a note to employees.

Sheryl Sandberg, a former Facebook COO who was Google’s vice president of sales and operations from 2001 to 2008 before moving to Facebook, said in a Facebook post that Wojcicki was a formative figure in her career in technology.

“She taught me business and helped me navigate a growing and somewhat chaotic organization early in my career in technology,” Sandberg wrote. “She was the person I turned to for advice time and time again. And that was the person for many others as well.”

Her husband, Dennis Tropper, announced her death in a social media post late Friday.

“Today my beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us after living with non-small cell lung cancer for two years,” he wrote.

“Susan was not only my best friend and life partner, but she was also a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to so many,” Trooper said.

No further details were immediately available about her death.

Wojcicki and Tropper’s 19-year-old son, Marco Tropper, He died in February. On the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, where he lived as a freshman.