Lifestyle

Powerful Women: Susan Wojcicki

by Ally Batista

Everyone is familiar with Google. I guarantee that you yourself use Google a minimum of five times a day, and if you’re anything like me, twice as much. Google is the world’s most visited website as of September 2012, along with owning major Internet subsidiaries such as YouTube and Blogger.

Most people are directed to the majority of the sites they visit via Google, which make the founders of the website, in my opinion, two of the most influential people in recent history. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the official founders of Google, but what many people don’t know is that a woman was crucial to the website’s startup.

In 1998 Susan Wojcicki was living in Menlo Park, California in 2,000 square foot home that she had recently purchased while studying to earn her MBA. Page and Brin were in the process of creating a search engine website, in the early days of the Internet. The two men came to Wojcicki looking for workspace. Wojcicki agreed to rent her garage space to the two Stanford University students for $1,700 a month in order to help pay off her mortgage.

Who would have known in that moment that the three of them would create the world’s greatest website? Wojcicki has been quoted in saying that “It’s a good reminder for the company that we did come from a small house, not a fancy house.”

As a way to help repay Wojcicki, Page and Brin offered her a position within the company as employee Number 18. She is now one of the top-ranked executives at Google who oversees the online advertising business as Vice President of product management. If you’ve ever seen an ad on the side of a website that says “Ads by Google”, you now know who’s responsible.

In 2003 Wojcicki came up with the idea for Google AdSense, which has aided countless websites in their success, not just Google’s. So what’s next for the company? Wojcicki hopes to bring Google’s advertising efforts to old news sources, such as print ads.

The sky’s the limit for Google.

Ally | Elite.

Photo Credit: Getty Images