Is Google Evil? Claire Stapleton on Bad Bosses, B******t Jobs, and Her Great Escape from Big Tech

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. Earlier this week on Monday, there was an interesting piece in The New York Times, an op-ed by Tressie Macmillan Cottam on how to fight back against Big Tech. She says start here with her piece. It includes a reading list of many books warning about Big Tech, including some that have been on the show by authors like Karen Hao, Yanis Varoufakis, Astra Taylor. And there's another book out today by my guest, Claire Stapleton, that might appear. The book is out this week, so maybe it's a bit late for Macmillan's list, but it's a book out about Google. Don't Be Evil, Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech. Claire Stapleton worked for many years at Google, so it's in part an autobiography, in part a memoir, a confession. And I guess, would it be fair to say, Claire, a warning about Big Tech?

**Claire Stapleton** (1:36)
Yeah. A bit of a cautionary tale for the young person who wanders into one of the biggest employment sources available to people today.

**Andrew Keen** (1:48)
So tell us your story. When did you start at Google?

**Claire Stapleton** (1:52)
I started in 2007 I came straight out of college. It was a very rare window for a huge amount of college recruiting that a couple of tech companies did. Google was really the new hot corporation at that time. This is so one year before Obama was elected, one year before the financial crisis. Google was this big source of hope and optimism. Technology was going to be the big driver of societal progress and not too many people questioning that at the time.
Surely not me as someone who was an Englishman.

**Andrew Keen** (2:25)
I have to say, I don't always toot my own horn. I probably do often, but I was one of the early people to actually warn. I wrote a book in 2007 called Cult Of The Amateur, which warned about the utopianism of Google. But go on. But then I have my own skeletons in the closet on the Google front as well, given that my current wife is the head of litigation. So I have it both ways, but sorry, go on.

**Claire Stapleton** (2:54)
Yeah, so I was a humanities major, English major, looking for a real job, sort of casting around for a real career. And I saw a posting for corporate communications and it was very vague. It was sort of like, come tell the story. And I knew a little bit about the story because Google was, as much as it was sort of exporting its technology and innovation at that time, so they'd acquired YouTube, Gmail and Maps and some of the other in search were sort of transforming how we navigate the world certainly.
But, you know, I knew a little bit about the story, but as much as they were exporting technology, they were exporting workplace philosophy. It was a huge part of what Google was communicating at that time. So I got drawn into the Whirlpool and that my job was a function that I never knew existed. And it was highly corporate, though not portrayed that way, which was internal communications. So instead of telling Google's story to the outside world, we were sort of supposed to pump up the story, the mission, the values, internally. And so I started giving campus tours. I worked on Larry and Sergey's, the founders of the company. They had a weekly meeting that was sort of a hallmark of the Google culture, very informal, come and ask anything, have a beer from the keg. It was, even as Google was 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 people in that period of time at a hiring like crazy, they kept this sort of folksy company feel through these sorts of internal communications. And so, alongside talking about the culture and the transparency and the kind of special sauce of the creativity and the collaboration and all the office design, we were also talking about Google's mission to change the world. And the philosophy was basically, get all the capture all this talent, get them so engaged and so fired up on what we're going to do to change the world together.
And here I was a sort of kind of handmaiden or an emissary of that mission to get everybody high on the mission.

**Andrew Keen** (5:03)
Were you at all skeptical? Wasn't it a bit too good to believe? I mean, we'll talk about Don't Be Evil in a minute and that corporate phrase that you were involved in, that Google adopted at least for a while as their brand. Did you ever question this? I mean, it seems, as I said, there were some of us who were always skeptical. Maybe we're just naturally skeptical. But didn't it seem, Claire, too good to be true? Especially given that you mentioned Larry and Sergey, people were becoming incredibly rich. I mean, you joined after the IPO. I presume you made a little bit of money yourself.