Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen · 5 Sep 2022 · 642pp · 141,888 words
and begin using YouTube’s corporate accounts to promote PewDiePie. This order, marketing staff there understood, had come from on high, “from Susan.” This was Susan Wojcicki (pronounced wo-JIT-ski), Google’s first marketer and YouTube’s chief executive since 2014. Each person at the retreat knew the tale of PewDiePie
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taken an academic idea for web search and formed a business. They rented space in a two-thousand-square-foot house of a mutual friend, Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s future chief, who watched them cram her garage full of computer servers, gear, and more brainiacs. There were many other search engines at
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an early investor. Schmidt and the founders relied on a tight inner circle of deputies. Most grunt work fell on two women, Marissa Mayer and Susan Wojcicki, who, after lending her garage, soon joined as employee number sixteen. Mayer, another Stanford graduate, led Google Books; Wojcicki looked over Google Video. Employees nicknamed
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upload videos. But afterward YouTube fell silent. Chess pieces were moving even faster in Mountain View, Google’s home. * * * • • • None of the Google Video features Susan Wojcicki had laid out for her CEO in the spring were working. Then, in August, Google played its ace: it added a link to Google Video
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. In San Bruno, Shiva Rajaraman, the Google product manager, had joined YouTube’s team determining where and how ads appeared on the site. Early on Susan Wojcicki called him into a meeting. In addition to Google Video, Wojcicki oversaw much of Google’s advertising technology, and she had a blunt question, “Why
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broke up because of feminism,” Molyneux told a Canadian reporter in 2008. “It doesn’t make feminism a cult.” CHAPTER 17 The Mother of Google Susan Wojcicki’s flight was canceled. It was 2010, well before her arrival at YouTube, and she was en route to Washington, D.C., for a hobnobbing
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on more stages and more visible in the press. At one point the second Google search result when people typed in her name linked to “Susan Wojcicki’s big lie,” a Gawker item accusing her of fabricating her role in inventing AdSense. “Yes,” she admitted to the journalist Steve Levy about the
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programs. Google invested in Anne’s company. “In a family-owned firm,” Bock said, “what gets rewarded more than anything is loyalty.” * * * • • • By 2013, though, Susan Wojcicki found herself stuck in the thick of Google’s family rivalries. She sat on Page’s L Team, which had frequent arguments. And someone from
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talks collapsed when Google balked at the price and potential antitrust scrutiny, and Amazon swooped in to buy Twitch instead. Facebook started tinkering with video. Susan Wojcicki became YouTube’s leader during the obvious phase. She didn’t need to invent YouTube’s business plan from whole cloth. She needed to give
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of his guests.) “If you find this information useful,” Molyneux said at the end of his January video, “please like, subscribe, and share.” * * * • • • April 2016 Susan Wojcicki sat on a stage before rows of her creators at the Andaz hotel on Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, to hear their concerns. YouTube’s
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investigation into “systemic compensation disparities against women” at the company. Damore’s memo certainly didn’t help. To distance the company from it, Google deployed Susan Wojcicki. She wrote a note to YouTube staff, which the company shared publicly. It began with a question her daughter posed: “Mom, is it true that
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, they could bold certain portions, like a line advising people to “go somewhere else” for help. * * * • • • That March, a month after the Parkland video mishap, Susan Wojcicki sat onstage in Texas for a long interview that featured plenty of awkward moments. Wojcicki’s public appearances no longer focused on all the ways
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sent to a San Francisco hospital in fair, serious, and critical conditions. (They would all survive.) Aghdam had fired twenty shots, including one killing herself. Susan Wojcicki, who was in a meeting on the second floor as the shooting began, walked out of the office in a borrowed black overcoat, trailed by
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her the weapon reported that this transaction did not stand out as unusual. CHAPTER 30 Boil the Ocean On Wednesday, a day after the shooting, Susan Wojcicki held an emotional company town hall where she shared plans to tighten office security immediately. A colleague told Kurt Wilms afterward that YouTube should drop
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form Uptime, an educational company designed to get people to stop mindless scrolling, the inverse of the goal his old employer kneaded into its algorithms. * * * • • • Susan Wojcicki developed a ready response for the mounting attacks, a go-to company mantra: “the Four Rs of Responsibility.” This was a vow to Remove material
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, where they were given a special tour of a Christian Dior exhibit. The company planned a roundtable discussion followed by a private reception and dinner. Susan Wojcicki flew in, although the advance schedule specified she would not be attending the dinner. Yet it did list the following meeting from 5:00 to
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closed its offices on March 6, days before much of the country shut down. By May, as the grim reality of the pandemic settled in, Susan Wojcicki arranged a video chat with Hank Green that he would broadcast. The pioneering YouTuber had already addressed COVID-19 on his science channel and his
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Trump off the service after the January 6 insurrection. Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, the chiefs of Facebook and Twitter, testified multiple times before Congress; Susan Wojcicki never did. YouTube was the sleeping giant of social media. There were many reasons for this. YouTube was better situated to avoid information warfare. You
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positive column—the site’s treasured communities and delightful brilliance—didn’t come from the company. “YouTube doesn’t foster creativity,” she concluded. “People do!” * * * • • • Susan Wojcicki entered her eighth year as CEO in 2022 stepping back from the stage. She gave few public interviews. Advertising and media partners who met her
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and economic giant with little transparency and accountability. “If I was going to make a list of people to have the amount of power that Susan Wojcicki has, she might be on it,” said Hank Green. “But I would just rather not see someone with that much power, especially someone who is
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your request.” Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, would only comment through representatives. All three people who have run YouTube—Chad Hurley, Salar Kamangar, and Susan Wojcicki—declined to be interviewed. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founders and majority shareholders of its parent company, Alphabet, have not spoken to
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-tell-you-what-might-kill-you-inside-23andme-founder-anne-wojcickis-dna-r. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a San Jose newspaper: Mike Swift, “Susan Wojcicki: The Most Important Googler You’ve Never Heard Of,” The Mercury News, February 3, 2011, https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/02/03
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/susan-wojcicki-the-most-important-googler-youve-never-heard-of/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT dubbed her: Patricia Sellers, “The New Valley Girls,” Fortune, October 13,
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-a-flat-earth. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT described the scene thusly: Harry McCracken, “Susan Wojcicki Has Transformed YouTube—But She Isn’t Done Yet,” Fast Company, June 18, 2017, https://www.fastcompany.com/40427026/susan-wojcickis-youtube-isnt-tv-but-its-tvs-biggest-rival. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT her service
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, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the company shared publicly: Susan Wojcicki, “Read YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s Response to the Controversial Google Anti-Diversity Memo,” Fortune, August 9, 2017, https://fortune.com/2017/08/09/google-diversity-memo-wojcicki
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/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In a subsequent interview: Eric Johnson, “YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki Explains Why the ‘Google Memo’ Author Had to Be Fired,” Recode, October 16, 2017, https://www.vox.com/2017/10/16/16479486/youtube
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-susan-wojcicki-james-damore-google-memo-diversity-gender-kara-swisher-podcast. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 27: Elsagate told a fellow YouTuber: Stanley “Dirt Monkey”
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few researchers and YouTube staff did: she watched a ton of YouTube. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT told The Guardian: Emine Saner, “YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki: ‘Where’s the Line of Free Speech—Are You Removing Voices That Should Be Heard?,’ ” The Guardian, August 10, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology
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/2019/aug/10/youtube-susan-wojcicki-ceo-where-line-removing-voices-heard. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT visited her Toronto home: Daniel Lombroso, “Why the Alt-Right’s Most Famous
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like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Wojcicki replied: MostlySane, “In Conversation with CEO, YouTube—Susan Wojcicki,” YouTube video, April 16, 2019, 26:30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P-9uEvKD0o. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “jacksepticeye and Elon Musk
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/story/google-walkout-organizers-say-theyre-facing-retaliation/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Green began: hankschannel, “YouTube, Pandemics, Creators, and Power: An Interview with Susan Wojcicki and Hank Green,” YouTube video, May 6, 2020, 54:38, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XPXht-gyj4. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter
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/the-fight-for-the-future-of-youtube. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT admitted about TikTok: hankschannel, “YouTube, Pandemics, Creators, and Power: An Interview with Susan Wojcicki and Hank Green,” YouTube video, May 6, 2020, 54:38, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XPXht-gyj4. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT would
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vaccine ban included two caveats: scientific discussions and “personal testimonials” about vaccines were still permitted. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT authored an op-ed: Susan Wojcicki, “Free Speech and Corporate Responsibility Can Coexist Online,” The Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/free-speech-youtube-section-230
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-censorship-content-moderation-susan-wojcicki-social-media-11627845973. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT he blogged: Neal Mohan, “Perspective: Tackling Misinformation on YouTube,” YouTube Official Blog, August 25, 2021, https
Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
by Emily Chang · 6 Feb 2018 · 334pp · 104,382 words
office. Like many great tech entrepreneurs before them, they looked around for an underutilized Silicon Valley garage. Through mutual friends, they found a landlord in Susan Wojcicki, who wasn’t just any Menlo Park homeowner. An up-and-coming businesswoman, Wojcicki, then thirty years old, had worked as a management consultant at
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creating that rarest of technological start-ups: one that turned an actual profit within just a few years. THE WOMEN WHO BUILT GOOGLE In person, Susan Wojcicki bears little resemblance to the many brash and often self-promoting entrepreneurs whom I’ve interviewed over the years. She exudes a quiet, steady confidence
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. Scott’s memories of her first years there are remarkable, as Silicon Valley stories go. “All of a sudden my bosses were Sheryl Sandberg and Susan Wojcicki,” Scott told me. “I was like, wow, you can really have a vibrant career as a woman and be a great mom too.” In Wojcicki
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broke in the press to run global operations at the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. And to make it even more complicated, Brin was married to Susan Wojcicki’s sister Anne, a Silicon Valley force in her own right, heading up the genetic-testing company 23andMe. Fast Company once called her “the most
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what makes a good leader and a good engineer run deep, and so they do at Google, despite the company’s efforts to combat them. Susan Wojcicki wrote an impassioned response to Damore’s memo in Fortune, acknowledging that while she has felt very supported by Google’s founders, she has battled
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, streaming services, and cable companies. Forbes recently ranked her as the eighth most powerful woman in the world. Nevertheless, the media has never gushed over Susan Wojcicki, nor has it picked her apart. What it has done instead is virtually ignore her—an oversight that becomes more astonishing the more you look
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months pregnant.) Tech companies generally also provide generous vacation and family leave policies. When Google increased its paid maternity leave from twelve to eighteen weeks, Susan Wojcicki told the Wall Street Journal that retention of new moms improved by a full 50 percent. Facebook offers four months of parental leave for both
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/12/29/politics/donald-trump-computers-internet-email/index.html. CHAPTER 3: GOOGLE: WHEN GOOD INTENTIONS AREN’T ENOUGH “I wish I could say”: Susan Wojcicki, “Studio 1.0: Susan Wojcicki Opens Up About Being a Working Mother in the Tech Industry,” interview by author, Bloomberg, Nov. 14, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news
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/articles/2016-11-14/studio-1-0-susan-wojcicki-opens-up-about-being-a-working-mother-in-the-tech-industry. And it’s worth examining: Erik Larson, “Google Sued for Allegedly Paying Women Less
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, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-14/google-sued-by-women-workers-claiming-gender-discrimination. Google had no marketing budget: Adam Levy, “Susan Wojcicki: From Google Doodles to YouTube CEO,” Motley Fool, July 5, 2015, https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/07/05
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/susan-wojcicki-from-google-doodles-to-youtube-ceo.aspx. “You do the content”: Steven Levy, In the Plex (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 84. In this particular
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Know Who He Is,” Medium, Aug. 6, 2017, https://medium.com/@catehstn/we-know-who-he-is-596fdd93d7c2. “I’ve had my abilities”: Susan Wojcicki, “Read YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki’s Response to the Controversial Google Anti-diversity Memo,” Fortune, Aug. 9, 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/08/09/google-diversity-memo-wojcicki. Forbes
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2016,” Forbes, Jun. 6, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alixmcnamara/2016/06/06/the-worlds-most-powerful-women-in-2016/#54f8fb971c83. “the cold weather”: Susan Wojcicki (@SusanWojcicki), “Super cold weather @Davos2016 is it’s easy to store breast milk. No freezer required. #moms.” Twitter post, Jan. 22, 2016, https://twitter.com
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/susanwojcicki/status/690467560396029952. “When I’m in the office”: Susan Wojcicki, interview by author, Bloomberg, Nov. 14, 2016, video, 23:36, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-11-14/susan-wojcicki-bloomberg-studio-1-0-11-13. she flourished at Google: Claire Cain Miller, “In Google’s
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.indeed.com/2017/04/03/silicon-valley-tech-job-migration. When Google increased its paid maternity: Susan Wojcicki, “Paid Maternity Leave Is Good for Business,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 16, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/susan-wojcicki-paid-maternity-leave-is-good-for-business-1418773756. Facebook offers four months: Mark Zuckerberg, “When Max
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy · 12 Apr 2011 · 666pp · 181,495 words
, Page and Brin filed for incorporation and finally moved off campus. Sergey’s girlfriend at the time was friendly with a manager at Intel named Susan Wojcicki, who had just purchased a house on Santa Margarita Street in Menlo Park with her husband for $615,000. To help meet the mortgage, the
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get more servers. “It showed we were a real business, doing the right thing and following through on our commitments,” says one early Google employee, Susan Wojcicki. (After sharing her home with Google, she had joined the company.) Google’s first stab at selling advertising began in July 1999. When Jeff Dean
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to begin with. “I think we made enough to buy the beer for TGIF [Google’s Friday-afternoon employee meeting] for a couple of weeks.” Susan Wojcicki later admitted the real problem: “No one clicked on the ads.” But she felt that the experiment was a great success. “It was incredible that
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main competition for the portal deals was the company that had invented ad auctions, Overture. “For a long time they were ahead of us,” says Susan Wojcicki, who began leading the ad team in 2002. “But now we had a more targeted ad system that could generate better results for our advertisers
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getting emails about the system. He begged Harik to change the name, but Phil it was. In February 2003, spurred by the success of AdWords, Susan Wojcicki wondered whether it might make sense to apply the same auction-based, pay-per-click model to a system that involved publishers other than Google
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wrote. “Everything could become Google’s indirect content.” This was a sentiment that Google itself explicitly endorsed. “We could change the economics of the web,” Susan Wojcicki said not long after the program launched. “You do the content and leave the selling of the ads to Google.” The idea of analyzing web
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80 or even 90 percent of the fee to the publisher. So Google decided to give the majority of the money to the publisher. Then Susan Wojcicki came up with an idea that some might find strange: What if we don’t reveal the revenue share percentage with the publisher? That way
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was a genius purchase. “Analytics generates about three billion dollars in extra revenue,” says Chan. “Know more, spend more.” “Every advertising should be measurable,” says Susan Wojcicki. “You should be able to adjust it, right? Then you should be able to tune it, track the right users, and target it to the
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company.” That culture took shape even as Page and Brin changed Google from a research project to a company and moved off the Stanford campus. Susan Wojcicki, who owned the house that hosted the company after it moved from Stanford, thought that Google’s origins in a residential setting, with all the
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were right on,” he says. “They knew exactly what was coming.” On August 13, 1999, everything was packed, from the monitors to the physio balls. Susan Wojcicki was monitoring the moving men from Graebal Van Lines as they trekked up and down the steps and lugged the boxes into the trucks. Followed
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human resource exec told a crowd of a hundred Nooglers in May 2009. Brin and Page had been thinking about a free cafeteria ever since Susan Wojcicki’s house and had even talked to some local chefs about their working for the company when it moved to University Street. One of the
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to work the espresso machine—not sailing. Six years after the IPO, an impressive number of Google’s most important early employees—executives such as Susan Wojcicki and Salar Kamangar and core engineers such as Amit Singhal, Ben Gomes, and Jeff Dean—were still working hard at Google, even though they had
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-state mathlete. “I will never have a date again!” she wailed. But there were less frivolous complaints. When you did a search for Google executive Susan Wojcicki, for instance, the second result was a posting from the Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag, inaccurately charging her with stealing the credit for developing AdSense
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aired in GPS meetings were settled by conversations and email among this loose cabal. The group included some of the very early people, such as Susan Wojcicki, Marissa Mayer, and Lori Park, who had been one of the first twenty employees and had been influential in activities such as protecting the logs
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—that Google had unique access to what was now the web’s most powerful tracking tool. “Of course it was a very big deal,” says Susan Wojcicki, who as the head of the ads program was involved in the discussions. “What changed was that we were now the first person.” (As opposed
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and to know what they thought of our crazy project.” A team from Google, including Smith, her biz-dev colleague Cathy Gordon, David Drummond, and Susan Wojcicki hurriedly arranged meetings with top publishers in New York City, creating a slide deck on the flight. The publishers welcomed Google, in part because they
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Drummond, Urs Hölzle, Bradley Horowitz, Kai-Fu Lee, Salar Kamangar, Joe Kraus, Andrew McLaughlin, Marissa Mayer, Sundar Pichai, Andy Rubin, Amit Singhal, Hal Varian, and Susan Wojcicki. (Apologies in advance to others worthy of explicit mention.) I also benefited from the friendship and insights from my shadow network of compatriots from the
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Guy Behind ‘Don’t Be Evil’ and Google Mail,” Newsvine, February 29, 2009; and the accounts in Planet Google and Googled. 174 Valleywag Owen Thomas, “Susan Wojcicki’s Big Lie,” Valleywag, July 5, 2004. 175 Schmidt was so furious Randall Stross, “Google Anything, So Long as It’s Not Google,” The New
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senior executives. Overall, however, Vascellaro’s reporting on Larry Page’s flip-flop on cookies conformed with my own findings. 336 interest-based advertising rollout Susan Wojcicki, “Making Ads More Interesting,” Official Google Blog, March 11, 2009. 342 the cars driving around Alan Eustace, “WiFi Data Collection: An Update,” Official Google Blog
Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta · 1 Jan 2009 · 532pp · 139,706 words
: the two-car Menlo Park garage and two downstairs spare rooms of an 1,800-square-foot house in Menlo Park. The owners were friends: Susan Wojcicki, an engineer at Intel, and her husband Dennis Troper, a product manager at a tech company. The newly constituted Google had found its way to
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. “I was really getting excited about Google,” said Shriram. The founders were getting excited too. “Larry said, ‘We’ll be at the doorstep of information,’” Susan Wojcicki recalled. Brin told her the company “was going to be worth billions of dollars.” That was also what they told visitors from search and portal
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to make money at Google, but they were clear that their mission was to build a great search engine and offer this search for free. Susan Wojcicki, the engineer who rented her garage to the founders and became employee number 18 and who later introduced her sister, Anne, to Brin, said the
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outgrown the five-thousand-square-foot Palo Alto office, where forty employees now knocked knees when sitting at their desks. They needed to move, so Susan Wojcicki called in a real estate agent, who suggested the founders clear their schedules to visit possible sites. The founders thought this was a waste of
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democratized advertising, luring small advertisers online, so AdSense would become a way for Web sites to generate income. The effort was led and architected by Susan Wojcicki, vice president, product management, who later received the prestigious Google Founders Award—paying about twelve million dollars—to honor her efforts. AdSense, Danny Sullivan told
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million dollars!” said Schmidt. “Sure we do,” said Brin. “I didn’t give a precise answer”—a couple of hundred thousand dollars, said Schmidt, chuckling. (Susan Wojcicki remembers that he alloted them a marketing budget of two hundred thousand dollars.) Weeks later, Schmidt asked Brin, “Sergey, how much money did you spend
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2002, and the founders were determined to snare it. “I want us to bid to win!” Page declared at an executive staff meeting, according to Susan Wojcicki. “You’re betting the company if you do that,” Kordestani warned. “We should be able to monetize the pages,” Page responded. “If not, we deserve
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new managers know this. They were, he said, “unduly harsh.” In early 2003, Google had four product managers: Salar Kamangar, Marissa Mayer, George Harik, and Susan Wojcicki. To oversee them as senior vice president, product management, Schmidt recruited Jonathan Rosenberg, who had been a senior manager at Apple and other tech companies
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both merriment and resolve. “It sounds like a tough thing to say, but that’s sort of what you need to do to make progress.” Susan Wojcicki, who rented them her garage, believes they gave each other strength—strength “to be different. They think alike. They had a shared vision. So when
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, 2008, and June 12, 2008; Craig Silverstein, September 14, 2007, and September 17, 2007; Jeff Bezos, July 9, 2008; Sergey Brin, September 18, 2008; and Susan Wojcicki, September 10, 2007, and April 16, 2008. 45 ten thousand search queries: Google’s “Google Milestones” chronology 45 Search really “does have a potential”: Karsten
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, 2008. 53 Barry Diller... “wildly self-possessed”: author interview with Barry Diller, March 3, 2009. 53 the founders “were on a mission”: author interview with Susan Wojcicki, September 10, 2007. 54 They set out to recruit: author interview with Ram Shriram, September 16, 2008. Another account of the negotiations with Kleiner Perkins
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figure out how to block pornography searches: author interview with Matt Cutts, August 20, 2007. 57 called in a real estate agent: author interview with Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008. 57 “Chef Audition Week”: author interview with Marissa Mayer, March 25, 2008. 57 “The fat found in fish”: interview with Charlie Ayers
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, October 11, 2007. 88 What Google was quietly exploring ... monitorthe results online: author interviews with Salar Kamangar, March 27, 2008; Marissa Mayer, March 25, 2008; Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008; Hal Varian, March 27, 2008; and Sheryl Sandberg, September 18, 2008. 90 Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi : author interview with Sergey Brin, September
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.com, June 2, 2008. 90 “AdWords is brilliant”: author interview with Nathan Myhrvold, March 28, 2008. 91 The effort was led and architected by Susan Wojcicki: author interview with Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008. 91 “basically turned the Web into a giant Google billboard”: Danny Sullivan, quoted by Jefferson Graham, “The House That Helped
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I work with these people”: author interview with Eric Schmidt, September 12, 2007. 91 a marketing budget of two hundred thousand dollars: author interview with Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008. 92 “probably was an accident”: Larry Page lecture at Stanford University May 1, 2002. 92 “It changed the way content providers think
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”: author interview with Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008. 92 $7 million: Google’s Form S-1 filed with the SEC, August 18, 2004. 92 “Now we could fund”: author interview
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“No one knew who Google was”: author interview with Lynda Clarizio, June 4, 2008. 95 “I want us to bid to win”: author interview with Susan Wojcicki, April 16, 2008. 95 “We could have gone bankrupt”: author interview with Sergey Brin, September 18, 2008. 95 “Overture offered more money”: author interview with
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both feel the same way ... we’re probably right“: author interview with Larry Page, March 25, 2008. 114 strength ”to be different“: author interview with Susan Wojcicki, September 10, 2007. 114 ”having a mental sparring partner“: author interview with Jen Fitzpatrick, September 12, 2007. 114 ”Having the two of them being completely
How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen · 1 Mar 2018 · 308pp · 85,880 words
, Anne, and Janet. In 1998, when Larry Page and Sergei Brin founded Google as Stanford graduate students, Susan rented them space in her garage. Today Susan Wojcicki is the CEO of YouTube and among the most powerful entertainment moguls in the world. Her sister Janet is a professor of epidemiology at UC
The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher · 5 Sep 2022 · 439pp · 131,081 words
, energetic mumble. He would be working, he found out, on a video platform that Google had acquired at the urging of an advertising executive named Susan Wojcicki. In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the creators and co-founders of Google, had set up the company’s first servers in her garage
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the hours after the election, the first to suspect Silicon Valley’s culpability were many of its own rank and file. At YouTube, when CEO Susan Wojcicki convened her shell-shocked staff, much of their discussion centered on concerns that YouTube’s most-watched election-related videos were from far-right misinformation
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, had proven ineffective. Finally, Facebook and Instagram imposed total bans on the movement in October, with Twitter gradually culling Q-linked accounts. YouTube’s CEO, Susan Wojcicki, said only that YouTube would remove videos that accused people of involvement in Q-related conspiracies in order to harass or threaten them. The narrow
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Kids Content amid Probe Report,” Rebecca Kern, Bloomberg, June 20, 2019. 25 cosigned a letter with Senator Marsha Blackburn: Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn to Susan Wojcicki, June 6, 2019. www.blumenthal.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2019.06.03%20-%20YouTube%20-%20Child%20Abuse.pdf 26 said he was “frankly disappointed
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, October 6, 2020. “Twitter, in Widening Crackdown, Removes over 70,000 QAnon Accounts,” Kate Conger, New York Times, January 11, 2021. 69 YouTube’s CEO, Susan Wojcicki, said only: “YouTube Tightens Rules on Conspiracy Videos, but Stops Short of Banning QAnon,” Jennifer Elias, CNBC, October 15, 2020. 70 at least 60,000
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.gov/files/Letter%20to%20Facebook%20—%20Malinowski_Eshoo_final_0.pdf 112 “The fundamental problem”: Tom Malinowski and Anna G. Eshoo to Sundar Pichai and Susan Wojcicki, January 21, 2021. malinowski.house.gov/sites/malinowski.house.gov/files/Letter%20to%20YouTube%20—%20Malinowski_Eshoo_final_0.pdf 113 “We gave it our
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs
by John Doerr · 23 Apr 2018 · 280pp · 71,268 words
. 13 Stretch: The Google Chrome Story CEO Sundar Pichai uses OKRs to build the world’s leading web browser. 14 Stretch: The YouTube Story CEO Susan Wojcicki and an audacious billion-hour goal. PART TWO: The New World of Work 15 Continuous Performance Management: OKRs and CFRs How conversations, feedback, and recognition
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, or a creative workplace culture. But if those fundamentals are in place, OKRs can guide you to the mountaintop. Larry and Sergey—with Marissa Mayer, Susan Wojcicki, Salar Kamangar, and thirty or so others, pretty much the whole company at the time—gathered to hear me out. They stood around the ping
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tap directly into all of those applications living in the cloud? But those would be stretch goals for another day. 14 Stretch: The YouTube Story Susan Wojcicki CEO Cristos Goodrow Vice President of Engineering Google is so teeming with stretch goals that it would feel incomplete to chronicle only one of them
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. And so here is a second, the story of YouTube and how it grew—exponentially—with the “stretch” OKR superpower. Susan Wojcicki, according to Time magazine, is “ the most powerful woman on the internet.” She’s played a central role at Google from the start, even before
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voice in persuading Google’s board to acquire it. Susan had the vision to see that online video was about to disrupt network television—forever. Susan Wojcicki and her Menlo Park garage, where it all began. By 2012, YouTube had become a market leader and one of the biggest video platforms in
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. And one more thing: Before YouTube could begin to chase its monumentally audacious objective, first it had to figure out how to measure what mattered. * * * — Susan Wojcicki: When I leased my garage to Larry and Sergey, I had no interest in Google as a company. I just wanted them to pay the
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, and they’re still working toward it, and I support that.” They gave us the autonomy we needed to meet the objective we’d set. Susan Wojcicki celebrating YouTube’s tenth birthday, 2015. Thinking Bigger Susan: Aspirational goals can prompt a reset for the entire organization. In our case, it inspired infrastructure
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this structure sooner, ideally the moment I started at Google.” Bill considered his Google mandate open-ended. He coached Larry Page and Sergey Brin—and Susan Wojcicki and Sheryl Sandberg and Jonathan Rosenberg and Google’s whole executive team. He did it in his characteristic style, one part Zen and one part
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not to recognize as well the 100,000-plus Google employees and alumni who have spread the goals gospel globally. I particularly thank Sundar Pichai, Susan Wojcicki, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Cristos Goodrow. Also, Tim Armstrong, Raja Ayyagari, Shona Brown, Chris Dale, Beth Dowd, Salar Kamangar, Winnie King, Rick Klau, Shishir Mehrotra, Eileen
I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59
by Douglas Edwards · 11 Jul 2011 · 496pp · 154,363 words
we'll get to that. Within a year, Larry and Sergey had taken leave from Stanford and set up in the Menlo Park garage of Susan Wojcicki, the college roommate of Sergey's girlfriend. Google's traffic began climbing and the company began hiring. They incorporated in September 1998, and when they
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. As I sat idly patting a three-foot ball, a number of folks on the business side of the company straggled in and introduced themselves. Susan Wojcicki, who owned the garage that had been Google's first headquarters, had left Intel to join her tenants' company as a marketing manager. Cindy McCaffrey
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more influence on the overall look of Google than anyone who worked on it after Larry and Sergey's original "non-design" design. Other than Susan Wojcicki, who had put her MBA to work at Intel, our group was new to marketing. Google hired Stanford grads in bulk and set them loose
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, but there were worse scenarios than crossing an invisible line. Sometimes a founder put forth "a good idea." "I have a good idea," Sergey informed Susan Wojcicki a couple of weeks after I started. "Why don't we take the marketing budget and use it to inoculate Chechen refugees against cholera. It
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old Stanford friends at the weather website Wunderground.com had written their own ad system and found it relatively easy to do. "Here we were," Susan Wojcicki recalls, "maybe fifty to sixty people, and we were competing already with these huge companies that had much bigger market share in search than we
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, "Thank you. We have a lot to do. You should really get back to work." Perhaps his absent partner, Jerry Yang, was the party guy. Susan Wojcicki handed out t-shirts she had secretly ordered proclaiming "Google and Yahoo got lucky"—Google's first official commemorative garment. If you want to make
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culture include Charlie Ayers, Heather Cairns, Devin Ivester, Katina Johnson, Jim Kolotouros, David Krane, Alan Louie, Miriam Rivera, George Salah, Sheryl Sandberg, Stacy Sullivan, and Susan Wojcicki. Sincere thanks also to Cindy McCaffrey for sticking her neck out to hire me, when clearly my academic credentials were marginal at best, and then
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you be able to finish your degree now?" [back] *** * For "miscellaneous." MISC was open to any Googler who had the patience to read it. [back] *** * Susan Wojcicki, Marissa Mayer, Jeff Dean, Salar Kamangar, and Urs Hölzle were among this group. [back] *** † Meaning that posts had to be approved by a designated moderator
I Hate the Internet: A Novel
by Jarett Kobek · 3 Nov 2016 · 302pp · 74,350 words
what he was really like. And let’s not get into his complicated romantic life, the servicing of which required a fuckpad on Manhattan island. Susan Wojcicki was the sister of Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Sergey Brin, and she was the Senior Vice President of Advertising. She was like Demeter, the
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goddess of the harvest and the growing earth. It was Susan Wojcicki who let Sergey Brin and Larry Page start Google in her garage, and it was Susan Wojcicki who really ran the show, overseeing the advertising which was the source of all the money
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. Susan Wojcicki had wanted to be an artist and Susan Wojcicki was even more mysterious than Eric Schmidt. No one knew much about her
Chokepoint Capitalism
by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow · 26 Sep 2022 · 396pp · 113,613 words
continued to focus on more growth, more users, better experience.”18 As recently as 2016 the company was still running at a deficit, with CEO Susan Wojcicki saying it was “still in investment mode” and had “no timetable” for becoming profitable.19 Google’s ownership helped YouTube in other ways too. By
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knows this, which is why it backflipped from its original opposition to the EU proposal. In an opinion published in the Financial Times, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki sang the praises of Content ID as “the best solution” for managing global rights and called for the EU to develop similar technology-based solutions
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. 19. Leena Rao, “YouTube CEO Says There’s ‘No Timetable’ For Profitability,” Fortune, Oct. 19, 2016, https://fortune.com/2016/10/18/youtube-profits-ceo-susan-wojcicki. 20. Levy, In the Plex, 265. 21. Victoriano Darias, “Content ID as a Solution to Address the Value Gap,” Journal of the Music and Entertainment
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They Want More of It,” The Verge, Feb. 4, 2020, https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21121370/youtube-advertising-revenue-creators-demonetization-earnings-google; Susan Wojcicki, “YouTube at 15: My Personal Journey and the Road Ahead,” YouTube Official Blog, Feb. 14, 2020, https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-at-15
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Review (2021 edition),” Kluwer Copyright Blog, Jan. 24, 2022, http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2022/01/24/article-17-the-year-in-review-2021-edition. 49. Susan Wojcicki, “YouTube Chief Says EU Copyright Plan Could Lead to Blocked Access,” Financial Times, Nov. 12, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/266e6c2a-e42e-11e8-a8a0
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