The High-Flying Wojcickis of Silicon Valley Talk About How They Stay Aloft (Video)
Last night, a pack of Wojcickis was honored by the Bay Area’s well known public affairs forum, the Commonwealth Club, which was feting the Silicon Valley family of high achievers for their “noteworthy contributions to local and global society.”
Indeed, as noted in a very lovely profile of the Wojcickis in the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week:
Stan is a pre-eminent physicist and professor emeritus at Stanford, and his wife, Esther, is an acclaimed educator in Palo Alto. Their oldest daughter, Susan, is senior vice president of advertising at Google; their middle daughter, Janet, is an epidemiologist and pediatric researcher on a Fulbright Fellowship in Swaziland; and their youngest daughter, Anne, married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, is CEO of the revolutionary personal gene-mapping company, 23andMe.
“Taken as a family, they are especially remarkable,” Commonwealth president and CEO Gloria Duffy told the Chronicle. “Here are two parents who did something very right to nurture these three daughters and give them the confidence that they could be leaders in fields that are largely male, whether medicine, high tech or biology.”
Indeed, which is why I went to the dinner for them last night at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, to ask Stan and Esther (at whose fantastic journalism class at Palo Alto High I have spoken) how they managed to do so well raising their Wojcicki posse of accomplished women.
(That’s right — an untypical feel-good story from me, so lean in, people!)
Here’s my Woj-filled video, with a cameo from Brin — who started the search giant in Susan’s garage — giving me advice on how to interview the family (hey, Sergey, stick to inventing the future via Google Glasses and I will handle the old-timey question-asking!):
If you want more, here is Susan at D10 last year, and Anne talking about her personal genomics startup:
