Highly rated tech magazine, TechBerg has unveiled tech icon, Gwynne Shotwell, the current Chief Executive Officer of Youtube as its Woman in Tech Wednesday (WTW).
WTW, one of the most high-profile tech personality ratings is a weekly review and rating of female tech personalities across the globe. It’s a special publication based on critical analysis and facts in the tech space.
Born in 1968, Susan Diane Wojcicki is a Polish-American business executive and presently CEO of YouTube. She has been in the tech industry for over 20 years.
Wojcicki was involved in the founding of Google, and became Google’s first marketing manager in 1999. She later led the company’s online advertising business and was put in charge of Google’s original video service. After observing the success of YouTube, Wojcicki proposed the acquisition of YouTube by Google in 2006, and has served as CEO of YouTube since 2014.
Wojcicki studied history and literature at Harvard University and graduated with honors in 1990. She originally planned on getting a Ph.D. in economics and pursuing a career in academia but changed her plans when she discovered an interest in technology.
She also received her Master’s of Science in economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993 and a Master of Business Administration from the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 1998.
In 2003, Wojcicki was the first product manager of one of Google’s seminal advertising products—AdSense. She earned the Google Founders’ Award in recognition for this work. Wojcicki was subsequently promoted to Google’s senior vice president of Advertising & Commerce, and oversaw the company’s advertising and analytic products, including AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Analytics.
YouTube, then a small start-up, was successfully competing with Google’s Google Video service, overseen by Wojcicki. She recommended and subsequently managed the $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube in 2006, as well as the $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick in 2007.
In February 2014, Wojcicki became the CEO of YouTube. She was named “the most important person in advertising”,as well as named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2015[26] and described in a later issue of Time as “the most powerful woman on the Internet”.
After Wojcicki became the CEO of YouTube, the company reached 2 billion logged-in users a month and that users were watching one billion hours a day. By 2021, YouTube had paid more than $30 billion to creators, artists, and media companies.
There are localized versions of YouTube in 100 countries around the world across 80 languages. Since she became CEO, YouTube’s percentage of female employees has risen from 24 to nearly 30 percent.
On April 15, 2021, Wojcicki was presented the “Free Expression Award” by the Freedom Forum Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing First Amendment freedoms. The award ceremony was criticized for being sponsored by her own platform.
Wojcicki has been an advocate for several causes, including the expansion of paid family leave, the plight of Syrian refugees, countering gender discrimination at technology companies, and getting girls interested in computer science and prioritizing coding in schools.
