Former YouTube CEO and longtime Google executive Susan Wojcicki dies at 56 [Video]

Susan Wojcicki, a pioneering tech executive who helped shape Google and YouTube, has died, her husband said. She was 56.

Wojcicki played a key role in Google’s creation and served nine years as YouTube’s CEO, stepping down last year to focus on her “family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about,” she said at the time.

She was one of the most respected female executives in the male-dominated tech industry.

Her collaboration with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin began shortly after they incorporated their search engine into a business in 1998. Wojcicki rented the garage of her Menlo Park, California, home to them for $1,700 a month, cementing a formative partnership. Page and Brin — both 25 at the time — continued to refine their search engine in Wojcicki’s garage for five months before moving Google into a more formal office and later persuaded their former landlord to come work for their company.

Wojcicki joined Google, now …