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The 'Godmother of Silicon Valley' has a message — and a warning
Meet the 'Godmother of Silicon Valley,' a high school teacher who quietly shaped the tech industry By Charles Rollet You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. Esther Wojcicki, known as the "godmother of Silicon Valley." Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for WIRED 2026-04-19T09:00:02.438Z Esther Wojcicki, 85, is the subject of a new documentary called "The Godmother of Silicon Valley." Wojcicki, who was a Palo Alto teacher, raised daughters who became the CEOs of YouTube and 23andMe. Wojcicki says to question authority and embrace tech, not "move fast and break things." It seems unlikely that Silicon Valley, a place where "cracked" engineers brag about how many AI tokens they're burning and how little sleep they get, was heavily influenced by a public high school journalism teacher rather than, say, a computer science instructor who moonlights as a drill sergeant. That's the message behind a new documentary, "The Godmother of Silicon Valley," which celebrates the impact of Esther Wojcicki, 85, known affectionately as "Woj" by the Palo Alto High School students who struggled to pronounce her last name.The documentary premiered on Thursday at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco. It explores how Wojcicki transformed the early Palo Alto tech scene through her journalism class, which she ran from 1984 to 2020, and through her daughters, former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and 23andMe cofounder Anne Wojcicki.Wojcicki's philosophy would sound familiar to Bay Area startup founders: break the rules, ask difficult questions, embrace failure, and adopt tech early. It's a school of thought forged through life experience, she says in the documentary.When she first started teaching, she stuck to well-worn lesson plans, but the kids simply didn't pay attention. So she started bonding with them directly — by taking them to the local mall on their first day and letting them run the school magazine themselves. She also taught them that failure was OK by letting them retake tests until they got an "A.""If you obey all the rules, you miss all the innovation," Wojcicki said at the premiere.Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was also a close friend of Wojcicki in the 1980s, which speaks to her passion for technology. She even got him to supply Macintoshes to her classroom.The deal had only one condition: "don't tell anyone where you got the computers," Wojcicki recalls Jobs telling her, "because then everyone will ask me for fr...
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Six area players are LV Scholar-Athletes - Times News Online
The Lehigh Valley Chapter of the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame 64th annual banquet will be held on Sunday, March 3 at Northampton Community Center at 4:30 p.m. The foundation will honor 34 high school and six college student-athletes from across the greater Lehigh Valley area ...
Esther Wojcicki's Post - The Godmother of Silicon Valley - LinkedIn
Here is the official trailer of the documentary about me called "The GodMother of Silicon Valley" It will be shown in multiple cities around the US and the ...
