Avengers of the Week | Susan, Janet, and Anne Wojcicki
Sisters Janet Wojcicki, a professor at UCSF, Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, and Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe
Let us introduce the three Wojcicki sisters: two are in high-profile businesses, the third is in academia, all of them are amazing, and they are our Avengers of the Week. In birth order, Susan is the CEO of YouTube, Janet is a PhD anthropologist and professor at the University of California at San Francisco, and Anne is a co-founder and CEO of 23andMe.
Born over a span of five years (1968-1973) in Northern California, the Wojcicki daughters’ mother, Esther, is a school teacher and journalist, and their father, Stan, is a physics professor at Stanford University who came from Poland as a child. The sisters literally grew up on the university campus.
Susan has a literature degree from Harvard, an economics degree from UC Santa Cruz, and an MBA from UCLA. She famously rented out her garage in Menlo Park in 1998 to Sergey Brin and Larry Page, where they developed Google’s signature search engine. She worked at Intel and Bain & Company before joining Google in 1998, which had then moved to more traditional headquarters. As marketing director, she helped develop its first ad program, AdWords. In 2005, she helped launch a video-sharing program at Google and then she successfully advocated for the purchase of competitor YouTube the following year, which was doing much better than Google’s version. YouTube is now valued at $90 million. Susan is married to Dennis Troper and has five children.
“One of the things that I'm trying to do is use the position that I'm in… to encourage the next generation of girls to think about the Internet as a career opportunity,” said Susan.
Janet has an international relations degree from Stanford and a PhD in anthropology/African studies from UCLA, as well as master’s degrees in maternal child nutrition and epidemiology from UC at Davis and UC at Berkeley, respectively. She is an associate professor in pediatrics at UC San Francisco, was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Africa, and conducts research ranging from maternal depression and childhood obesity to nutrition and HIV.
Anne, who loved figure skating and ice hockey as a child, earned a biology degree from Yale University, where she played on the women’s varsity ice hockey team. She worked as a Wall Street analyst focused on healthcare and biotech companies for four years before becoming disillusioned and quitting to pursue disease prevention. She thought about medical school but instead began doing molecular biology research at the National Institutes of Health and UC at San Diego. In 2006, she teamed up with Linda Ivey and Paul Cusenza to start 23andMe, named after the 23 chromosomes in a normal human cell, to provide direct-to-consumer genetic testing and identify potential genetic health risks. It was a success and has since branched out into using anonymous data, with permission, to help develop new drugs and treatments in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline. Anne was married to Google co-founder Brin, an early investor in 23andMe, from 2007 to 2015 and has two children.
Anne says her parents taught them all to be free thinkers. “I remember them telling me, ‘Don’t be afraid if someone disagrees with you.’”
Not surprisingly, the sisters’ parents were frequently asked for advice on raising successful children, so Esther Wojcicki wrote a book called How to Raise Successful People. It focuses on developing five characteristics: trust, respect, independence, collaboration, and kindness.
For their achievements in technology and academia, we honor three accomplished sisters Susan, Janet, and Anne Wojcicki as our Avengers of the Week.
Sisters @jwojcicki, a professor at UCSF, @SusanWojcicki, CEO of YouTube, and @annewoj23, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe, are the @GenderAvenger #AvengerOfTheWeek for their achievements in tech and academia. #GenderAvenger https://www.genderavenger.com/blog/avenger-of-the-week-susan-janet-and-anne-wojcicki