CEO of YouTube and one of Google’s first employees, Susan Wojcicki, is leaving the company. She made the announcement on Thursday in a personal update on the video-sharing platform.
Susan Wojcicki will step down to start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects she’s passionate about, according to a personal update on the YouTube Blog. Neal Mohan, one of Wojcicki’s longtime lieutenants who has worked at Google for 15 years, will take over as YouTube’s new CEO.
Wojcicki is officially Google employee No. 16, and she famously rented her parent’s garage to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin a year before she was hired, where they set up their first office. Susan Wojcicki joined Google when the company had no revenue and has been with the company for the past 25 years—basically its entire history. In 1999, she became Google’s first marketing manager, and in 2003, she became Google AdSense’s first product manager.
Susan Wojcicki is credited with coming up with the idea to buy YouTube in 2006, and she oversaw the $1.65 billion acquisition, as well as the $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick the following year. She was the CEO of the world’s largest video site by 2014. Wojcicki took over YouTube when it was already a household name, the world’s third most visited website after Google and Facebook.
She oversaw YouTube’s pivot to multiple vertical content apps, which began in 2015, with the launch of ad-free YouTube Premium, in-house YouTube Originals content, YouTube Music, YouTube Gaming, and YouTube Kids. YouTube TV, a cable TV replacement service, debuted in 2017, YouTube Stories, a Snapchat clone, debuted in 2018, and YouTube Shorts, a TikTok clone, debuted in 2021.
Wojcicki, 54, will be succeeded by her deputy, Neal Mohan, a senior advertising and product executive who has been with Google since 2008. Mohan, a Stanford graduate, was named YouTube’s chief product officer in 2015.