Susan Wojcicki gave lessons from Titanic and “Frozen” in 2014

The former YouTube CEO died on Friday after two years of living with lung cancer. A Silicon Valley pioneer, she spent more than two decades leading various parts of Google and parent company Alphabet.

At the 2014 commencement ceremony of the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where she earned her MBA in 1998, Wojcicki recounted her Anderson graduation speech.

The speaker was US Filter CEO Richard Heckmann, who died in 2020. As he talked about the Titanic and 10 things from its infamous 1912 sinking, there was one that stood out and continues to resonate throughout her career.

“We can be very wrong,” Wojcicki told the graduates.

Although the Titanic had the latest technology at the time and was considered unsinkable, hubris caused the ship to hit an iceberg and sink, she added.

Wojcicki thought about that lesson while helping build Google and during the dot-com crash, when he often drove past empty buildings that once housed prominent Internet companies.

“And I thought to myself, I could be very wrong,” she recalled. “It seems like that was true for Google as a small company, but it’s even more true for us now that we’re bigger. When big companies go down, they go down much harder. When you’re driving a big ship, it turns out that it’s even harder to see the icebergs. When you do, it’s even harder to turn the ship around to avoid those icebergs and get away.”

Showing how the smartphone revolution has suddenly changed the internet landscape, Wojcicki urged the audience to embrace change and segued into a management lesson from the 2013 Disney film. Frozen.

A key factor in its success was Disney’s embrace of YouTube, she explained. After it hit theaters, fans began uploading their own covers of the film’s signature song “Let It Go” to YouTube.

Disney could have easily asked the platform to remove those videos, but instead, the entertainment giant chose to accept the change and respect its audience, Wojcicki said. “They just let her go.”

Any industry will face change, with serious business consequences as new technologies emerge and consumer preferences change, she added.

“It seems unusual, our instinct is to fight. We must embrace it. We have to let go,” she said.

In 2016, Wojcicki was prescient in seeing changes coming for the media industry, saying Of luck Jennifer Reingold that the future belonged to individual content creators who had the power to build audiences on YouTube.

“They are their own media companies. They’re the CEO, they’re the personality, and then behind them, as they get bigger, they have production, editors and writers, so we really have this next generation of media companies,” she predicted.

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