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 free computers.” Some of the machines later got repurposed into benches that now sit in the high school’s media arts center.
While Wojcicki’s classes made her famous in Palo Alto, her daughters turned her into a Silicon Valley celebrity.
Susan Wojcicki was one of Google’s first employees and became the CEO of YouTube. Her house even became Google’s first headquarters, where co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin would steal food from the fridge and soak in the hot tub without permission, the elder Wojcicki recalls in the documentary. (Susan Wojcicki died at 56 in 2024 after living with lung cancer.)
Another daughter, Anne, founded the DNA testing company 23andMe, while her third daughter, Janet, became a renowned pediatrician.
Wojcicki has become well-known for raising successful children and has written a book on the subject. Just like with her journalism classes, Wojcicki encourages parents to let their kids embrace failure and be independent. In the documentary, she expounds on her TRICK philosophy — Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, and Kindness.
“Everybody wants to be respected,” she says in the film. “People work really well when they feel trusted and respected.”
The problem, though, is that Silicon Valley culture now embraces Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s motto to “move fast and break things” without thinking so much about the long-term consequences, Wojcicki said at the premiere.
Questioning authority matters a lot, but so does kindness — and revising, rather than breaking, everything.
Zuckerberg “got it a little bit wrong,” she said, to laughter from the audience.
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