Susan Wojcicki is stepping down as CEO of YouTube after nine years, effective immediately. She has named Neal Mohan, who has served as Chief Product Officer for the company for the past seven years, as her successor.
“I’ve decided to step back from my role as the head of YouTube and start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about,” she wrote in a company blog post.(Opens in a new tab) Wojcicki will now take on an advisory role across Google and Alphabet.
In her post, Wojcicki lauds Mohan’s work launching the very successful YouTube TV, as well as helming YouTube Music, Premium, and Shorts. She also notes that Mohan has led the company’s Trust and Safety team, which will become even more important as “the promises of AI,” as she puts it, become a potential area of growth.
It’s the end of an era for YouTube, which has weathered public scrutiny over its handling of hate speech, content moderation, and misinformation during Wojcicki’s tenure. When she joined the platform in 2014, it had just crested one billion users and “YouTubers” were still considered oddities. Now YouTube hosts 2.5 billion users worldwide, and YouTube creators have made full-fledged careers out of their channels.
A friend of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Wojcicki was one of the earliest employees at Google and in her own words, “managed marketing, co-created Google Image Search, led Google’s first Video and Book search, as well as early parts of AdSense’s creation, worked on the YouTube and DoubleClick acquisitions, served as SVP of Ads,” before heading up YouTube.
