Born: July 5, 1968, Santa Clara County, Califonia, USA
Early days. She is the daughter of Stanley (born in Warsaw Stanislaw) Wojcicki, a Polish American physics professor emeritus at Stanford University and Esther Wojcicki, an educator of Jewish –Russian descent. She has 2 sisters: Janet Wojcicki, (PhD, anthropologist and epidemiologist) and Anne Wojcicki, founder of 23andMe. She attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, and wrote for the school newspaper. Wojcicki studied history and literature at Harvard University and graduated with honors in 1990. She originally planned on getting a PhD in economics and going into academics, but changed her plans when she discovered technology. She also received her masters of science in economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993 and a Master's in Business Administration from the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 1998.
Career. In September 1998, the same month that Google was incorporated, its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up office in Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park. Before becoming Google's first marketing manager in 1999, Wojcicki worked in marketing at Intel in Santa Clara, California and was a management consultant at Bain & Company and R.B. Webber & Company. At Google, she worked on the initial viral marketing programs as well as the first Google doodles. Wojcicki also took part in the development of successful contributions to Google such as Google Images and Google Books. She grew within Google to become senior vice president of Advertising & Commerce and lead the advertising and analytic products including AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Analytics. She developed AdSense, which became Google's second largest source of revenue. She oversaw Google Video, and proposed to Google's board that the company should purchase YouTube, then a small start-up that was competing with Google. 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 later became the Senior Vice President of YouTube. In February 2014 she became the head of YouTube. Wojcicki, called "the most important person in advertising" and "the most important Googler you've never heard of", was 16th on Forbes Magazine's List of The World's 100 Most Powerful Women in 2011. In 2012 she was 25th on this list and in 2013 she was 30th. In 2014, she was named #12 on the list. She was also named on Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business list in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 at #43, #28, #18[ and #19, respectively. Wojcicki was named #1 on the Adweek 50 list in 2013. She was named #36 on Vanity Fair's New Establishment list in 2013 and #39 in 2012.
Personal life. Wojcicki married Dennis Troper in 1998. They have five children. On December 16, 2014, ahead of taking her fifth maternity leave, Wojcicki wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the importance of paid maternity leave. She is often quoted talking about the importance of finding balance between family and career.
Based on an article that appears in Wikipedia
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Published on 9/12/15
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