Documentary spotlights Esther Wojcicki’s Silicon Valley influence — and her warning to tech

A new documentary argues that one of Silicon Valley’s formative influences wasn’t a coder but a public high school journalism teacher. The Godmother of Silicon Valley, which premiered Thursday at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco, profiles Esther Wojcicki, 85, a longtime Palo Alto High School educator known to students as “Woj,” and examines how her classroom and her family helped shape the Valley’s culture.

The film follows Wojcicki’s teaching career from 1984 to 2020, when she built a nationally known student newsroom by telling teenagers to break rules, ask hard questions, adopt new technology early, and see failure as part of learning. Early in her career, she says, standard lesson plans fell flat.

So she scrapped them—taking students to the local mall on day one to report, letting them run the school magazine, and allowing test retakes until they earned an A. “If you obey all the rules, you miss all the innovation,” she told the audience at the premiere.

Her enthusiasm for technology drew powerful allies. In the 1980s, Wojcicki was close with Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, who, she recalls in the film, quietly supplied Macintoshes to her classroom on the condition that she not reveal the source “because then everyone will ask me for free computers.” Some of those machines were later repurposed into benches that now sit in the high school’s media arts center.

Wojcicki’s household became part of Silicon Valley lore. One daughter, Susan, was among Google’s earliest employees and later served as CEO of YouTube; the family’s home served as Google’s first headquarters, where, she recalls, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin would raid the fridge and use the hot tub without permission.

Another daughter, Anne, co-founded DNA-testing company 23andMe, while a third, Janet, became a renowned pediatrician.

Wojcicki, who has written about parenting, lays out her TRICK framework in the film—Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, and Kindness—arguing that “people work really well when they feel trusted and respected.” Even as the documentary celebrates her rule-breaking ethos, Wojcicki told the premiere audience that today’s startup culture too often embraces Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” mantra without regard for long-term consequences.

Questioning authority matters, she said, but so does kindness—and revising, rather than breaking, everything. Zuckerberg “got it a little bit wrong,” she added, drawing laughter. The Godmother of Silicon Valley positions Wojcicki’s classroom as an unlikely but influential node in the Bay Area’s tech story—and closes with her reminder that innovation and responsibility are not mutually exclusive.