Susan Diane Wojcicki was born in Santa Clara, California, on July 5, 1968, the daughter of Esther Wojcicki, an American journalist, and Stanley Wojcicki, a Polish physics professor at Stanford University.[6][7][8] Her maternal grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants.[9] Her paternal grandfather, Franciszek Wójcicki, was a Polish politician who was elected MP during the 1947 Polish legislative election.[10] Her paternal grandmother, Janina Wójcicka Hoskins, was a Polish-American librarian at the Library of Congress and was responsible for building the largest collection of Polish material in the U.S.[11] She has two sisters: Janet, a doctor of anthropology and epidemiology,[12] and Anne, an entrepreneur who is the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe.[13][14]

Wojcicki grew up on the Stanford campus, where mathematical scientist George Dantzig was her neighbor.[15] She attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, and wrote for the school newspaper.[16] Her first business was selling "spice ropes" door-to-door at the age of eleven. A humanities major in college, she took her first computer science class as a senior.[17] She studied history and literature at Harvard University and graduated with honors in 1990. She originally planned on getting a PhD in economics and pursuing a career in academia, but changed her plans when she discovered an interest in technology.[15] She also received her MS in economics in 1993 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MBA in 1998 from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.[18]