Susan Wojcicki, who is actually Google’s 16th employee (so she’s been at the search giant for quite some time), was hugely instrumental in the search giant buying YouTube over a decade ago. Wojcicki was sitting in a board room answering questions from Google’s executives about why YouTube was worth over a billion dollars. Of course, now in 2018, it’s easy to see why it was worth that much.
This actually all started about a month before YouTube launched in 2005. Google had launched its own free video-sharing platform, Google Videos. Wojcicki had uploaded the first video for users, which was “a purple Muppet singing a nonsense song”. At first Wojcicki and Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, were unsure of what to make of it. But when she was playing the video for her kids, they shouted “Play it again!” and that showed the possibilities of something like YouTube, could be. The reaction showed just how great user-generated content could be, but little did they know that a decade later, it could surpass traditional TV.
With Google Videos, user-generated content wasn’t immediately available to users, like they were on YouTube. And by the time that design flaw had been fixed, YouTube had taken a big chunk of the market share. However, YouTube didn’t have the resources to keep it going – similar to Pokemon GO in the beginning. Wojcicki said she “saw an opportunity to combine the two services” after she realized that YouTube would need to sell. So then she worked up some spreadsheets for Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to justify the $1.65 billion price tag. Wojcicki was called into a board meeting, before the acquisition was made, and fielded a ton of questions. The board felt that her user growth numbers were a bit ambitious, but Google still gave the green light to purchase YouTube. And now, nearly a decade later, YouTube is valued at $160 billion – making it a huge steal for Google – and Wojcicki is now the second-ever CEO of YouTube.