Susan Wojcicki, Googler No. 16 and longtime YouTube CEO, is stepping down

Enlarge / Susan Wojcicki launched one of the company's new verticals, YouTube TV, in 2017. (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images)

There are big changes at YouTube today as longtime CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down from her role and leaving Google. The YouTube Blog features "A personal update from Susan" that announces she'll be stepping down to "start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I'm passionate about." YouTube's new leader will be Neal Mohan, one of Wojcicki's longtime lieutenants who has worked at Google for 15 years.

Wojcicki is officially Google employee No. 16, and a year before she was hired, famously rented her parent's garage to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, where they set up their first office. Wojcicki joined Google when it had no revenue and has been at the company for 25 years—basically, its entire history. Her first role was Google's first marketing manager in 1999, and in 2003 she became Google AdSense's first product manager. Wojcicki is credited with the idea to buy YouTube in 2006 and managed that $1.65 billion acquisition as well as the $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick the next year. By 2014 she was CEO of the world's biggest video site.

Wojcicki gained control of YouTube when it was already a household name, the No. 3 site in the world after Google and Facebook, and the web's de facto video site. She oversaw a dramatic expansion of the service via YouTube's pivot to multiple vertical content apps starting in 2015, which saw the launch of the ad-free YouTube Premium, in-house "YouTube Originals" content, YouTube Music, YouTube Gaming, and YouTube Kids. The cable TV replacement service YouTube TV launched in 2017, the Snapchat clone YouTube Stories launched in 2018, and the TikTok clone YouTube Shorts launched in 2021. Last last year, YouTube set itself up to be a pillar of the sports world with a huge $2 billion-a-year deal for NFL Sunday Ticket. Today the brand is basically the content wing of Google, and we're all expecting the next YouTube app to be "YouTube Podcasts."

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