San Jose Mercury News
Susan Wojcicki: The most important Googler you've never heard of
By Mike Swift mswift@mercurynews.com
Posted: 02/07/2011 07:42:43 AM PST
Yes, Google started in Susan Wojcicki's rented garage. But in her mind, that might be the single least important fact about her long and deep relationship with the Internet giant.
Thirteen years ago, the then-tiny company's former landlord became its 16th employee and first marketing manager. Today, she is one of its 12 senior vice presidents, although by one measure she is first among equals: The advertising products she oversees accounted for about 96 percent of Google's revenues in 2010.
In her years at Google, the 42-year-old Wojcicki (pronounced Whoa-jit-ski) has been a driving force in many of the company's signature initiatives: AdSense, which places Google advertising on other websites and blogs, and its acquisitions of DoubleClick and YouTube. Even the doodles that distinguish Google's home page were developed by her.
Wojcicki, in short, might be the most important Googler you've never heard of -- even many who recall her garage's place in Silicon Valley history don't realize that its former owner went on to become arguably the key figure in Google's online advertising juggernaut.
Wojcicki's contributions to Google's growth are "absolutely not" appreciated outside of the Googleplex, said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, a former Googler. "I don't think she's concerned about that. Susan's interested in doing a great job and making sure her team gets recognition for the things they do. ... Within Google, the executives and certainly the people on her team have enormous respect for her."
Inside the company, the low-key, even-keeled executive is known as a talented manager who inspires people under her with her willingness to share credit. As Google's chief moneymaker -- advertising products under Wojcicki brought in $28.2 billion in revenue in 2010 -- she also has a striking belief in the odd mix of professorial idealism and capitalistic ambition that comprises Google's sense of self.
"The reason I like my job is that I have this desire to create," Wojcicki told the Mercury News recently in a rare interview. "I have this desire to create things and build things, and Google has enabled me to build and create things and to build products that are used by people all over the globe."
Wojcicki has still another role at Google. She has helped shape the company's unconventional culture, drawing on her experience as the first Googler to have a baby and as a pioneer who has navigated the cultural land mines that make women so rare among Silicon Valley executives.
Though she is guarded personally, Wojcicki made clear in the interview how important that role is to her. "I have tried to be a leader," she said. "I have tried in my role of being one of the first women at Google, let alone the first woman to have a baby, to really try to set the tone that this is a great place to work for diversity reasons."
Wojcicki's clout at Google reflects her unique relationship with co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Like them, she is from a family of academics. "No one in my family had worked in business until I came along," she said.
The three met when Brin and Page paid Wojcicki $1,700 a month to rent the garage of her house in Menlo Park, the first home for a newly incorporated Google in 1998. Along with the parade of venture capitalists, journalists and other visitors who found their way to the offices of the embryonic search engine through Wojcicki's living room was the woman who became Brin's wife -- Susan's youngest sister, Anne.
More than a dozen years after that first encounter, Wojcicki is one of about a dozen executives who convene with Page and Brin in Google's boardroom each Friday for a meeting dubbed "Execute." Those newly inaugurated meetings are aimed at achieving Page's stated mission, as he becomes CEO in April, of remaking Google into a company that can innovate with the nimbleness of competitors like Facebook.
But her prominence within Google contrasts sharply with her relative anonymity outside.
Costolo had just finished a chat with Wojcicki at a recent tech conference when another executive came up beside him.
"They said something like, 'Hey, who was that you were talking to over there?' And I said, 'It's Susan Wojcicki,' " Costolo recalled recently. "And they said, 'Oh, that's Susan Wojcicki!' "
Inspired marketing
A Silicon Valley native who grew up on the Stanford campus as the oldest daughter of the chair of the physics department, Wojcicki studied history and literature at Harvard before eventually joining Google as its first marketing manager.
"We had no marketing budget, but I was supposed to market the company -- by myself," she recalled. "It was a little overwhelming."
Yet she quickly made the crucial early decision to embed Google's search box for free in university websites and elsewhere across the Internet to build traffic.
But Wojcicki's biggest impact at Google has been developing AdSense, which transformed the Web by allowing hundreds of thousands of websites and blogs to make money by displaying Google ads. AdSense spread more than $6 billion in ad revenue across the Internet in 2010, and now has more than 1 million websites and blogs running Google's ads. It is the company's second-largest source of revenue, after search advertising on its own sites.
Paul Buchheit, the founder of Gmail, had the idea to run ads within Google's e-mail service. But he and others say it was Wojcicki, with the backing of Brin, who organized the team that adapted that idea into an enormously successful product.
Despite her success with AdSense, Wojcicki by 2006 was running a Google unit -- Google Video -- that was getting trounced by a small startup called YouTube, where millions of people shared their self-produced videos online.
Wojcicki's solution to that problem shows her calm under fire. With just a day's notice, she developed and presented to Google's board the financial model justifying the $1.65 billion purchase.
"I knew it was going to be really hard for us to catch up, and that this was a real phenomenon," Wojcicki said. "I understood it, because we had our own product."
YouTube initially was a huge money-loser, and it landed Google in a brutal legal fight with Viacom, which charged that Google had knowingly benefited from pirated content. But the combination of the DoubleClick, YouTube and other acquisitions, such as the AdMob mobile ad network, has begun to pay dividends. This fall, Google for the first time revealed revenue figures for display and mobile ads, saying the company was on track for $2.5 billion a year in display and $1 billion in mobile revenue -- its first major source of revenue outside keyword search ads.
Wojcicki's fingerprints also are on some of Google's most controversial products, including some advertising programs that have been blasted by privacy advocates because they collect voluminous data on users.
"Google has not been honest about its data-collection practices. It tries to veil what it does," said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "Google likes to pose as a company that is transparent and considers privacy, but the truth of the matter is that it's all about the collection of data from the individual user."
Some privacy advocates have derided Google for trying to soft-pedal their concerns. One example they could cite is a blog post Wojcicki wrote in 2009, announcing that Google would start tracking users' movements across the Internet in order to target advertising -- an unpopular practice with many users. But the post, headlined "Making ads more interesting," never used the word "tracking." She described it, benignly, as "interest-based advertising."
While helping build the Google juggernaut, Wojcicki gave birth to four children. Until recently, she drove a minivan, and now drives a Toyota Highlander hybrid suitable for soccer mom duties. She said a key to her work-family philosophy is to "compartmentalize," broadcasting clear boundaries between work and home. "My kids know I'm home every night for dinner," she said.
Her sister Anne, now CEO of 23andMe, a Mountain View company that maps people's genetic traits, said she has adopted her older sister's rule for her own son with Brin -- she'll do no business travel while children are very young.
"If I have a problem, I always go to Susan," Anne said. "She taught me if you're going to go home and be with your kids, that's OK."
Keeping things on track
With Page moving up to become CEO, executives like Wojcicki and another early Googler, YouTube chief Salar Kamangar, are expected to step up and take more visible roles. That is something Wojcicki may find uncomfortable. Former Googlers say she has a knack for recruiting and motivating other strong leaders, but shuns the spotlight for herself.
Pete Koomen, who joined Google in 2006 fresh from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and not long afterward was chosen by Wojcicki to work directly with the founders and senior executives in setting Google's goals before each quarter, said he was struck by the regard Page and Brin, both of whom are strong personalities, had for Wojcicki.
"They are just incredibly imaginative, and meetings can have a tendency to go off track a little bit," said Koomen, who left Google last year. "Susan has always had this amazing ability to focus them and challenge them."
Costolo and Koomen say Wojcicki's hallmark is to allow her teams to take credit for accomplishments.
"The way she builds her teams is by emphasizing the individuals on the team and letting them get credit when they've done something. It builds confidence in the inexperienced folks," said Koomen, who now heads a startup in San Francisco.
"Whenever I try to describe what makes a good operating executive," said Costolo, "the person I've got in my mind is Susan Wojcicki."
Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/swiftstories.
Susan Wojcicki
Age: 42
Joined Google: 1999, as employee No. 16
Position: Senior vice president responsible for all of Google's advertising and measurement platform products, including AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick and Google Analytics
Education: Bachelor's degree, Harvard University; master's in economics, UC Santa Cruz; MBA, UCLA
Family: Married to Google executive Dennis Troper; four children
