Remembering Susan Wojcicki

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1:16Hi, listeners. It's Reid here. You may have heard about the recent passing of Susan Wojcicki. Susan died August 9th at just 56 years old. after battling lung cancer. She was a force in Silicon Valley and beyond. She played important roles in the early days of Google, and she led YouTube as CEO for many years before stepping down in 2023 to look after her health and to be with her family. Susan was a passionate advocate for issues close to her heart, including gender equity in the tech world. What I will always remember about Susan is that combination of common-sense pragmatism and passion for her mission.

2:00And what I will miss, personally, is the passings of one of the very good people. And professionally, a Silicon Valley leader with a humanist heart. We wanted to revisit the stories and lessons she generously shared with Masters of Scale. So here is the episode we recorded with her a few years ago. Thank you for listening and for learning from Susan.

2:49It seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it. This is Masters of Scale.

3:04I'm Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host. And I believe to navigate massive scale, you have to find and keep true north. When it comes to navigation, it's hard to find a more classic phrase than follow the North Star. It sits very close to the North Pole. The Southern Hemisphere has its own pole star, Sigma Octentis, but follow Sigma Octentis hasn't quite caught on as a saying. The North Star never appears to go anywhere because it's so near the axis around which the world turns. That makes it perfect for navigation. Cow hands would use it on cattle drives. Explorers would use it on expeditions.

3:49And if you were in the scouts, your troop leader might have taught you how to spot it if you ever get lost. No matter where you are in the Northern Hemisphere, if you just find the North Star, you'll know how to get your bearings. Finding and keeping true north is just as important when you're navigating a company through massive scale. This kind of growth happens fast. If you and your team haven't established founding principles as clear and bright as the North Star, it's all too easy to become hopelessly lost. I wanted to talk to Susan Wojcicki about this because as the CEO of YouTube, she's led the organization through dizzying scale and the wrenching challenges that come with it.

4:30In 15 years, YouTube has become the world's largest video platform. It's also the world's second largest search engine next to its parent Google, where Susan was one of the chief architects of Google's advertising and analytics model. There's maybe no one in Silicon Valley better qualified to speak on the experience of navigating a business through rapid growth at Google and at YouTube, all the while trying to keep one eye on the horizon. Especially because she remembers when that horizon and the entire landscape around Silicon Valley looked very different. When I grew up, nobody knew where Palo Alto was.

5:08In fact, I always used stuff to say outside of San Francisco. People knew either Stanford or the bike shop. Susan's dad was a physics professor, and she grew up on the Stanford campus with her sisters, Janet and Anne. You may remember Anne as the founder of 23andMe and a previous guest on the show. Growing up in Silicon Valley would give Susan a unique vantage point from which she could actually watch the landscape change. I would go to this place where you get temp work. It was called Kelly Girl at the time. It's been renamed Kelly Services. I was actually sent to the Palo Alto Sanitation Company for three weeks where I answered the phone and did filing for them.

5:45But then I was sent to a startup. And that's when I realized there's something happening here that's really interesting. That something was the start of the dot-com era. It would transform Silicon Valley's trajectory and Susan's as well. Growing up among academics, she'd always assumed she'd become a professor. I was doing a master's in economics, and I was about to apply for a PhD, and I just couldn't bring myself to apply. I was so close. I had already completed this master's program, but it just wasn't in me. Susan had been on a lifelong path toward academia when the siren call of Silicon Valley's growing potential demanded that she change course.

6:27Her sense of true north had shifted. She got her MBA instead, and that brings us to 1998. Susan and her husband have just bought a house in Menlo Park, a Menlo Park now at the epicenter of the tech boom.

6:47We didn't know if we could afford the mortgage, so we decided we were going to rent part of our house. Then it turned out that Sergey and Larry were starting their company and they needed office space. She's referring, of course, to Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google. It was actually really hard to find office space. Our joint friend suggested, why don't you rent Susan's and Dennis's house? So they showed up and they said, oh, like, this looks great. They were living in their dorm.

7:23So Google and its seven employees started out in Susan's literal garage. Susan laid out the map to orient us for an origin story from that time period that I'd never heard.

7:39They entered through the garage. And they actually had a hallway with a few bedrooms off of it. And it sounds like it's really big, but the whole space was probably less than a thousand square feet. I did have this small issue because I had ordered a new refrigerator for my kitchen and I was super excited about it.

8:01As a newly married new homeowner and the delivery time was something like eight to five. And so I took a shower at eight. and at 8.05 when I came down the refrigerator had already been delivered and Sergey and Larry had put it in their space

8:28they didn't know they just thought like you know there's a refrigerator this is where it went I had to call Sears at the time and say can you reinstall my refrigerator And they were confused, like, why did you install your refrigerator in the wrong place? Nobody has that issue. I find this story delightful, a lesson in how quickly directions can go astray if you lose vigilance in the wrong five minutes. But refrigerator mishaps aside, Susan's early arrangement with Google would end up pointing her toward her own true north. Google soon outgrew Susan's Menlo Park garage. They were focused on one thing, make search better.

9:13That was their clear true north. And all of the resources went into making sure they did it better than anyone else. But they needed guidance on how to grow their users. So they tapped their former landlord to be employee number 16, Google's first director of marketing. At the time, it was unclear that Google was going to be successful because there were so many other search engines, none of which really did a good job, but it was a very crowded space. Nobody thought there was actually any money in search. Even if you know Google's origin story, even if you live through it, it's truly challenging to recall what that mindset was like.

9:51Search engines at the time were choked with paid results and banner ads. Most described themselves as portals and crammed their homepages with headlines and widgets designed to keep you tethered to ad-bearing content as long as possible. So when Google launched its plain white homepage, it was a revelation and a result of following their true north. Google kept their compass trained on those three words, not their famous slogan, don't be evil, but their internal mantra, make search better. This would be the key to their scale. But as Susan said, no one at the time could see how there would be much money in search.

10:34They didn't have a map. And let's be clear, at that time, neither Susan nor Google had a map either. I didn't really know what I was doing. In fact, I was a little scared because I thought I knew about marketing, but I'd never really been a marketer. And if I really had been a marketer, everything they would have said to me would have scared me away. In business school, you learn who's your target audience and you build a targeted campaign. And so I would say, who do you want me to market to? And they said, everybody. We just want everybody to use Google. It can be useful to everybody, which is true.

11:08But how do you do that with no budget? With no clear directions to guide her and no map to follow, Susan used Google's core product, its excellence in search as her North Star. I quickly learned, because we had no budget, that building product and using the product and the property that we had was the highest leverage way. What Google needed most was more users. So Susan looked for groups who really needed search. We created this way for all universities to have Google search on their properties. And that was a program I worked on. Everybody in college at the time had internet and they had lots of searching requirements.

11:45And it was just a really quick way to spread and to get the word out. How did you make the universities aware? Was it just simply a make a search bar inclusible and send out an email? Was there PR strategy? Was there targeted outreach? So we created a program that was free, where you just copy and paste some HTML and put it on your site. And then it created an automatic site search of your university and whatever domains you chose, as well as Google. Yep, I remember that bit of HTML. Very clever. For those who don't remember, this was just a simple embed code that would let universities adopt Google's web crawler as their own.

12:25It solved a problem for universities, saving them untold hours of programming their own search tool. And it saved Susan untold hours of relationship building. I could call a few new universities and I would have a long conversation, or I could just put something on the website and make it free where you copy and paste. I would come in every day and I would see thousands of universities who had downloaded it and had used it. So I very quickly learned that this was a much more scalable way to be able to get the word out. Google's user numbers took off. By the year 2000, they'd captured a quarter of the search market.

13:00But headline after headline quipped, how will Google ever make money? This definitely seems quaint now, but at the time, it was a serious question. They'd given out their search bar for free. They'd gotten rid of the traditional ways that search engines made money in the past. How could Google earn revenue without ruining the guiding principles that drove their success? Go back to what your scoutmaster might have told you. The key to navigating uncharted territory is if you don't have a map, use a compass. For companies, it's the same. When there is no map, use your compass, the one that points true north to your founding principles.

13:43For Google, quality of search results was the magical metric they used to define success. And they followed this compass as they designed their own ad model. a transformation from industry norms. One of Google's biggest innovations was focusing on user quality and saying ads is going to have its own quality, but it's going to be in a separate section and we'll never mix the two. Because the early search engines had this whole paid inclusion model where you could pay to be in the search results. And Google, from the very beginning, rejected that. So Google made the decision, radical at the time, not to mix paid ads with organic search results.

14:21Their next move was equally contrarian. Google probably had about 30 people, and we decided to build our own ad system. And that was just really, in retrospect, an insane decision that we have no people that understand advertising. No one has ever sold advertising. No one has ever built an advertising system. But yet we're going to build one when there already are all these existing systems. It may have seemed like hubris, or as Susan called it, insane, to decide you're better off inventing a brand new model than using what's there. And in most cases, I would not recommend it. But Google's founders understood their own true north.

14:59Their prime directive was to improve search for individual users. And that had to be true for their revenue model too. Whatever they built could not compromise their product. The ads would have to be additive. And this was no small feat. Our first ad models never really worked that well. And the first one completely failed, where we just took Amazon affiliate links and serve them. And nobody clicked on them. And there was a moment where everyone thought maybe we were wrong, and we should just go back to banners. But we innovated a number of times on the ad model. The vision was, and I don't want to say this was mine, but they said, we should really make the ads be targeted.

15:40So if you type in Picasso, We should show you ads related to Picasso or you type in, I don't know, Golden State Warriors. It should be Golden State Warrior merchandise. And we should do that in every single language of the world. And it should be sub-second delivery time because we would never want to slow down Google for ads. And it should be super targeted and relevant. We had been working on it for over two years. So we actually came on a model that's pretty close to what we have today with the existing AdWords. AdWords, Google's advertising platform. Today, call Google Ads. Google's targeted ad model has worked so effectively, it can feel as though your browser is spying on you.

16:23But that startling accuracy is by design. Remember, Google's true north is the quality of search result. Did the ad turn up useful results for the user? And when they clicked, did the ad take them somewhere they wanted to go? These metrics are consolidated into a unified quality score. And at this calculation, Google has gotten very, very good. Before we get to the next part of Susan's story, I thought it would be useful to understand what true north actually means scientifically, even if what we learn is that it doesn't really exist. North is not really a natural concept. It's a human definition.

17:05So that means there's no overriding sort of true north in the universe. That's Dr. Becky Smethurst, astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, and her insights on true north build toward a great metaphor for entrepreneurs. So Earth, for example, spins on its axis with north tilted at 23 degrees compared to the sun's north. And that's what gives us our seasons, right? We're pointing towards the sun in summer and we're pointing away from it in winter. Venus, though, it spins in completely the opposite direction, so its north is flipped compared to ours. Uranus spins on its side at 98 degrees compared to the sun.

17:44So every single object in the solar system has its own individual unique north. And if this is already making it feel like you don't know which end is up, don't worry. Dr. Becky says physics has your back. For something that rotates, you can always define a north. The definition that physicists have agreed on was that if you make a fist with your right hand and let your fingers curl in the direction that the object rotates in, and then you pop your thumb out, then the direction your thumb is pointing is north. That's something we call the right-hand rule. The right-hand rule is a useful way to remember that north is relative to each rotating body, each planet, each star, or even each galaxy.

18:29The Milky Way is made up of over 100 billion stars, And all of those stars are orbiting around the black hole at the very centre, just like the planets orbit around the sun in our solar system. So as a whole system of stars, it also rotates. So since our galaxy rotates, it has its own north. But hang on, finding it gets a little more complicated. For years, astronomers assumed that the galaxy's north and the Earth's north were the same. Before physicists really agreed on what the definition of north was, people referred to anything in the Earth's northern hemisphere as north. So, for example, traditionally, we have called the Milky Way's north pole as the pole of the Milky Way that is in the Earth's northern hemisphere.

19:17But then, as our tools for observing the night sky improved, we learned which direction the Milky Way was actually turning. And what we find is that it rotates in the opposite way to what the solar system and the sun does. So if we use the right-hand rule from before, essentially we'd sort of be pointing thumbs down. So the Milky Way's north pole is in the direction of the Earth's south pole. So what did scientists do when faced with this case of mistaken direction? Did they go back and scrub all the textbooks and change all the planetarium show scripts? Nope, they kept the old, incorrect definition.

19:57Technically, what we call the galaxy's North Pole is actually the galaxy's South Pole. You're sort of stuck with this traditional definition that if we change now, we'll make communication very difficult. Even though it sounds dreadfully unscientific to keep describing the wrong north for the entire galaxy, it would have caused even more chaos to rename everything. Because, after all, the only reason we bother to determine north in the first place is to establish a common language. The main point of defining what to call north is to agree on a coordinate system. So if I say that a star is visible from the northern hemisphere, you immediately know where on Earth I mean.

20:39If I say that a star is located in the galaxy's northern hemisphere, astronomers and astrophysicists all agree on where that is. Gone are the days of lone hero science, right? We have these huge international teams and collaborations working all on the same problem. So we need these naming and language conventions just to be able to communicate and work effectively together. So I think that's a nice analogy for a business too. It is a nice analogy. Defining true north for your organization, especially as it scales, gives everyone on your extended team a way to communicate and to agree on what's most important.

21:17This impacts not just grand corporate strategy, but the teeny day-to-day decisions made by everyone on your team. Thank you, Becky, for extending our metaphor. Again, that was Dr. Becky Smethurst, astrophysicist at Oxford and YouTuber. Her channel is called Dr. Becky. And that brings us back to Susan's story, which is about to merge with the story of YouTube. When we last left her, Susan had helped Google scale its mission of making the internet navigable. What is the next undiscovered country? I started working in video with Google's product called Google Video. And we actually started, believe it or not, just with a simple web page where we said, send us your video, upload your video to Google.

22:07And we didn't even tell people what we were going to do with it. And surprisingly, people all over the world uploaded video. Why they did that, they just wanted to share it. I remember the first video I saw, which were these puppets that were just singing in a Nordic language. It was really fascinating. Google Video was going to fit squarely into Google's mission of making search better. At essence, better search means better access for everyone. And as Google grew, its true north evolved to democratizing the Internet. Google early on had a lot of philosophy about democratizing. Like, how do you make advertising accessible to everyone?

22:45How do you make publishing accessible to everyone? And so this was very aligned with making video production. But Google wasn't the only entrant into the race toward a video platform to democratize broadcasting. There was another. All right, so here we are, one of the elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long fronts. And that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say. That is the very first video uploaded to YouTube, posted by and starring co-founder Javed Karim on April 23, 2005. You may well have seen it. Since then, it's been viewed 106 million times.

23:35And if you watch this video, it says so much about what YouTube's appeal has always been. The host is standing at the San Diego Zoo on an overcast day. He's wearing a casual windbreaker. His head is actually obscuring part of the elephants he's describing. The focus isn't even on the elephants. It's on him. So YouTube, like, broadcast yourself was the original tagline. There was this appeal of the democratization of broadcasting what you had to say. Capturing this democratized video market was something Google Video and YouTube were racing to do. And YouTube was winning. YouTube launched a few months after us and were very soon bigger than us.

24:19It had to do with some of the ways their product worked and the fast turnaround in terms of upload to having that be available for all their users. And we realized that we were losing. It was both a moment of incredible highs. Wow, we found this great area that we could develop and build product. And then soon afterwards, realizing, wow, as soon as we thought we had found something, we were failing. Failing at scale was not a familiar experience for Google, even back in 2005. The company had gone public the year before, and they had just reported a 700 % increase in third quarter profit, largely thanks to the success of AdWords.

24:59Should they go toe-to-toe with YouTube and try to kill them? Or was it more aligned with their true north to make them part of the mission and buy them? It was clear to me this was just a huge opportunity in terms of future video, and I was a big advocate. along with Salar Kamengard, who was also the CEO of YouTube. We got together and we had a good conversation with Sergey and Larry. I produced a model. I did a model in like 15 minutes to show that this actually had huge potential in the future, not just in views, but in revenue too. We didn't have a lot of time. We had to make the decision really quickly because it was for sale.