The death of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki on Friday has highlighted her pivotal role in one of Silicon Valley’s most legendary stories.
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in 1998, they rented Wojciechowski’s Palo Alto garage to use as their global headquarters.
during 2014 Commencement Speech at Johns Hopkins UniversityShe described the circumstances that led to this fateful decision. She said she was newly married and had just bought a house, but could barely afford the mortgage. A mutual friend connected her with Page and Brin, who were both still students at Stanford at the time.
“They seemed nice, but their idea seemed kind of crazy,” Vojsky said.
Although the name of their new company sounded strange to her and she wasn’t sure what it meant, it didn’t matter at the time.
“As long as you pay your rent on time, you can build your own Google thing here,” she recalled telling them.
Eventually, she joined them for late-night sessions over pizza and M&Ms, she added, where the Google founders talked about how their technology could change the world — and how happy they were to have a washer and dryer in the garage.
According to Google, the company has expanded its workspaces to three small bedrooms on the ground floor while increasing the number of employees to six people.
In 2018, to celebrate Google’s 20th anniversary, the company used archival footage. Recreating what the garage looked like in 1998.
The Street View team then posted photos of each room, allowing viewers to explore the startup’s original office space in all its messy glory.
The office also includes a piano keyboard for musical breaks and a ping-pong table, although photos show it folded up and hidden in a corner.
In a 2018 video accompanying the rebuilt office, Vojsky said: “Oh my God, it’s amazing to see that it hasn’t changed. It’s like going back in time.”
Google also posted a lovingly crafted video of the garage shot by the company’s sixth employee, engineer Harry Cheung, who has since turned into an angel investor.
After touring the rooms with his camera, he discovered Page hard at work at a computer.