Susan Wojcicki ('98) recently visited UCLA Anderson and told students how she returned to Menlo Park, CA after earning her MBA, bought a house and rented the garage to Stanford Ph.D. students Sergey Brin and Larry Page who founded Google. Susan talked about the difficult decision to leave her job at Intel to become one of Google's earliest employees, and described some of her experiences as the company grew into today's global communication service.
Many of Susan's memories were milestones in the development of web marketing, search, content and connectivity. What she didn't say was that she played a critical role in developing the business model to support the firm's vision. As Senior Vice President for Marketing, Susan is one of the most influential people in the world of online marketing.
She recalled a pivotal experience that persuaded her to join the young venture. "I had this one moment," she said, "when Google search went down. It wasn't a professionally run service then, it was something at Stanford and I couldn't access it for this one moment in time. At that moment, I realized, 'I can't get my work done. I can't find anything.' This made me realize how important the service was. There were a lot of other search engines at the time, but it made me see, 'This is a service I can't live without.'"
To read the whole story about Susan Wojcicki, please find the rest on the UCLA Anderson web page.
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