Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s former CEO, and long-time Google executive, died on Saturday at the age of 56 following a two-year battle with lung cancer.

“I am so saddened to inform you of Susan Wojcicki’s demise. “My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after two years of living with non-small cell lung cancer,” Wojcicki’s husband, Dennis Troper, said on Facebook.

“Over the last two years, even as she dealt with great personal difficulties, Susan devoted herself to making the world better through her philanthropy, including supporting research for the disease that ultimately took her life,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, said in a post yesterday.

Wojcicki, one of the most notable women in technology, joined Google in 1999 as one of its initial few workers, years before the company purchased YouTube.

In 2006, Google paid $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube.

Wojcicki was Google’s senior vice president of advertising products until becoming CEO of YouTube in 2014.

Wojcicki left YouTube in 2023 to focus on “family, health, and personal projects” after nine years as CEO. Neal Mohan, a top advertising and product executive who joined Google in 2008, succeeded her. Wojcicki had expected to join Alphabet, Google’s parent firm, as an advisor.

“Twenty-five years ago, I decided to join a couple of Stanford graduate students who were developing a new search engine.” Their names were Larry and Sergey… “It would be one of the best decisions of my life,” Wojcicki said in a blog post on the day she quit YouTube, alluding to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

“Today we at YouTube lost a teammate, mentor, and friend, Susan Wojcicki,” Mohan wrote in a post on X.