Former YouTube boss Susan Wojcicki has died of cancer at the age of 56

Susan Wojcicki, the technology pioneer and former YouTube boss who played a key role in the growth of Google, has died at the age of 56 after a battle with lung cancer, her husband announced on Friday.

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Susan Wojcicki, one of Silicon Valley's most prominent women, spent nearly two decades building the Internet search engine Google started in her garage into a global technology giant.

Ms Wojcicki operated YouTube, which was bought by Google in 2006, for nearly a decade before stepping aside last year to focus on personal, family and health-related projects.

Her husband, Dennis Troper, wrote on Facebook that she had been suffering from lung cancer for two years.

“My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children left us today,” he wrote.

“Susan was not only my best friend and partner in life, but also a brilliant mind, a loving mother and a dear friend to many. “His impact on our family and the world is immeasurable,” added Dennis Troper.

Susan Wojcicki worked at Intel in 1998 when her friends Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google in the garage of her Menlo Park, California home. A year later, she joined the company as its 16th employee and first marketing director.

At Google, she played a role in building the image search engine and worked on the acquisition of YouTube and advertising platform DoubleClick.

“It's hard to imagine a world without her,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on the social media platform.

Susan Wojcicki, who was named CEO of YouTube in 2014, introduced new types of advertising and helped the streaming television service grow as viewers increasingly turned to the Internet for shows and movies.

She is also known for addressing concerns around children's privacy, hate speech and the spread of misinformation, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.

When she took a job at Google four months pregnant, she advocated for paid parental leave, arguing in a 2014 essay that companies should offer generous policies.