- Age: 46
- Known for: Google, YouTube
- Quote: "Google is fascinating, and the book isn't finished. I'm creating, living, building, and writing those chapters."
It seems that every great technology story starts off in a garage. For Google, that garage belonged to Susan Wojcicki. It was 1998 when Larry Page and Sergei Brin set up office in Wojcicki's garage. At the time she was working as a marketing manager for Intel but by 1999 Wojcicki was working as marketing manager for Google.
One of the first things Wojcicki worked on was a marketing idea that would hopefully take Google viral. The idea was to create a doodle on the Google homepage. It was so successful that it has endured through all the changes Google has gone through and become synonymous with the brand.
From marketing manager, Wojcicki was promoted to senior vice president of Advertising and Commerce. In this role she helped create tools that are used by the majority of companies on the web. The likes of Google Analytics and AdWords were created, so internet companies could evaluate just how well their websites were doing. This tools were also lucrative to Google, with some reports saying that these tools contribute to 96 per cent of Google's profits.
From this Wojcicki changed the way the world views video content. In 2006, Wojcicki was overseeing Google Video and made the request to buy a video startup called YouTube. The site was bought by Google for $1.65 billion and is still the place for video on the web.
Wojcicki is now CEO of YouTube and firmly established as not just one of the most important people in Google, but the technology world.
- In partnership with Microsoft, powered by the HP Spectre x360
