CEO of Youtube, Susan Wojcicki, has announced that she will be stepping down from her role at Youtube and has agreed with Google CEO, Sundar Pichai to take on an advisory position at Alphabet. Wojcicki, who has been with the company since 2014, will be replaced by her deputy, Neal Mohan. In a letter penned to her team at Youtube, Wojcicki said that her decision to leave the company was informed by a need to focus on her family, health, and personal projects.
Announcing her decision, the mum of five reminisced on her time as one of Google’s first employees and how she took a chance on co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page who set up shop for their search engine idea in her garage in California in 1998. Google would be one of her many investments as she has also invested in startups like Airbnb, women’s health company, Maven, and a fintech company, Propel. A history and literature graduate from Harvard University, few people know that Susan Wojcicki is a strong advocate for parental leave and made headlines in 2015 when she increased the amount of paid leave for new parents at YouTube to 18 weeks. In 2006, Google also bought Youtube on her recommendation.
Wojcicki spoke in glowing terms about her replacement Neal Mohan, as having set up a top-notch product and user experience team and that he played pivotal roles in the launch of some of YouTube’s biggest products, including YouTube TV, YouTube Music and Premium, and Shorts. She adds that Mohan has led the company’s Trust and Safety team, ensuring that YouTube lives up to its responsibility as a global platform. She further commended Mohan for his “wonderful sense of the company’s product, business, creator and user communities, and employees,” and said she believes that he will be a terrific leader for YouTube.
In a 2019 interview with revered American TV show, CBS’ 60 Minutes, Wojcicki said she limits the time her kids spend on Youtube because too much of anything is bad. At the time, she also said her focus as CEO of Youtube was to address and make better some of the issues Youtube was facing in the area of controversial content and extremist views. None of which have noticeably reduced between 2019 and now.
In the thick of Youtube being charged to take more responsibility for how content creators use the platform, Neal Moran will have to bell the cat, but that may prove a tall order or trivial in comparison to the company’s focus on competition and revenue generation as it introduces more and more avenues for increasing time spent on the platform and newer ways to split ad revenue.
