In September, Jessica Powell tapped on her phone’s contact list and texted her old boss, the Google CEO, Sundar Pichai. She also called a former co-worker at the company’s roughly 200-person communications team that, until last September, she led. Powell’s news: she was about to release a satirical novel about Silicon Valley, which readers would be likely to interpret as being about Google. The book, The Big Disruption, was billed as “a totally fictional but essentially true Silicon Valley story”. In public relations terms, it was a rogue turn – going from burnishing the company’s image to lampooning a company that looked suspiciously like it.
Powell, 40, nursed some eleventh-hour nerves about the transition. Until last fall, Powell was on Google’s management team as vice-president of global communications, crafting strategy on how its policies and products should be presented and defended. After a career as the behind-the-scenes puppet master of corporate messaging and a bout of wanting to publish anonymously, she decided to put her name front and center. She didn’t want to irk Google friends, and even penned an introductory essay that argues you can love tech and still see its flaws. Powell insists the book is not a thinly veiled “tell-all” and that her distancing the book from Google is not one final act of PR.
“I’m loathe to have it be interpreted as being about one company,” Powell says, on a couch in her cousin’s San Francisco apartment, not far from the route of the Google charter bus she used to ride to work. Powell is friendly, well-spoken, and sharp – she hits her talking points, but also seems liberated by the freedom of, finally, not speaking for anyone but herself. “You read a book about Google, and if you’re then sitting at Facebook or wherever, then you don’t necessarily think this stuff applies to you. I wanted it to be all-encompassing: I wanted it to go after startups, and I wanted it to go after the big tech companies.”
If Powell wasn’t literally taking notes during her past jobs – as she claims – it’s clear she was keeping score. The Big Disruption is still a 90,000-word send-up that should make any somewhat-reflective tech worker at least smirk in recognition, or, as one data engineer wrote on Twitter: “Getting strange looks on the train after chuckling way too loud.”
In the book, Powell takes aim at what she calls Silicon Valley’s echo chamber and monoculture of thought, and company leaders’ egomaniacal fear of being “reduced to little more than a passing caption in a computer science museum”. She wields Bonfire of the Vanities levels of absurdity and social observation to chronicle this particular northern Californian strain of masters of the universe: an awkward Silicon Valley janitor stumbles into a product management job, dropping MBA buzzwords to squeak by – “Does this align with the strategy on our roadmap?” (“No one seemed to notice anything was amiss,” the passage continues. “If anything, it seemed like product managers just asked questions that other people had to answer.”)
Meanwhile, a yogi CEO has concocted an outrageous plan to keep engineers from defecting to a startup rival because the campus’ plush array of amenities isn’t sufficing, and, separately, one team devises an app to get the engineers laid.
Elsewhere, company-wide email threads of petty bickering between departments circulate, casual sexism towards the very few female employees is rampant and the tone-deaf assumptions about what female users want is spot-on. The only major female character in the sea of men, a receptionist eager for her chance to climb the ladder, saves the company – and ends up where? Back as a receptionist.
After Thursday’s New York Times bombshell report on multiple men accused of sexual contact with subordinates and given handsome exit packages, parts of Powell’s book look especially prescient. Powell, who was only head of comms during one of the exits described in the piece, was surprised and angered by many of the details in the piece.
The New York Times report interviewed a former legal department senior contracts manager, Jennifer Blakely, who had an extramarital relationship with Google’s general counsel David Drummond starting in 2004; while Drummond was promoted and thrived after he disclosed the relationship, Blakely says she transferred to a different department and left a year later, signing a host of waivers on the way out.
In the book, Powell writes of a Prada-slacks-wearing SVP of sales remembering his tryst with the receptionist, Jennie: “She was that sexy hippie receptionist who kept asking him for career advice as he tried to take her clothes off … It was probably a bit stupid to hit on someone who worked at Anahata, but he wasn’t going to worry about it. He always could have her fired if things got uncomfortable.”
Still, Powell says the book wasn’t based on Google. “Nothing in the book actually happened in real life – as far as I was aware at the time that I wrote it,” she says, given that she penned the vast majority of it in 2012. “But in the startup environment I worked in at the time, as well as what I saw happening around me at other companies and industry events, the idea that a powerful man could sleep with an employee and have there be no repercussions seemed very possible.”
Growing up in Orange County, Powell studied comparative literature at Stanford and started in Google’s London office as a contractor in 2006. She moved up to running comms for southern and eastern Europe and then Asia, making several trips back to the Silicon Valley HQ. Her European post placed her on the front lines of privacy and monopoly battles with the invading American tech companies long before the backlash against tech would mount in the States.
Her view of the industry darkened upon taking a job running comms at Badoo, the London-based dating app that offers up willing dates in one’s vicinity. The company has gotten press coverage for using staff parties with pole-dancing and sushi served on scantily-clad women as a recruiting device. Powell was perturbed by marketing the app in the lofty language of “creating connections” when she considered it more a glorified hookup app. She was even more bothered, she claims, by the treatment of women and minorities at the startup, or how employees would gather round a computer and make fun of users’ profiles they considered desperate. (Badoo declined to comment on this story.)
Quitting Badoo in 2012, Powell knocked out the first draft the The Big Disruption in a three-month “fever dream”, she says. “I think it was the anger about how I saw people treated at the startup that fueled me a lot through the book, imagining a company with zero moral compass and what they do once they have power.”
An agent shopped the book around that year – but it was roundly rejected by publishers. “They were like: it’s funny, it’s well-written and there’s no market,” Powell says. Once she got the job at Google headquarters in Mountain View, bringing her back to California, she figured it would be wrong to publish it while working inside the industry. Powell says she did two major revisions while working there, but mostly surrendered any ironic detachment to become an intense insider after getting promoted to VP of comms in 2015, reporting directly to the CEO. “I gave everything to my job and there was not a whole lot left,” she says.
Having been accepted to an MFA program at University of San Francisco, Powell gave her notice in summer 2017, but extended her time when Gizmodo got its hands on the internal manifesto written by the engineer James Damore arguing women were biologically less suited for engineering than men – Powell helped them through the fiasco that resulted in Damore’s firing. “I think Sundar made the right call,” she says.
Powell got another agent the next year, and the manuscript was eventually passed to Medium, which bought the digital rights to publish it as the platform’s first full-length book. Her pay hasn’t been disclosed, but Powell donated the money to #YesWeCode – a not-for-profit organization that trains women and minorities for tech jobs – and Book Trust, which donates book to low-income children. “I didn’t want to be seen as opportunistic. Like you spend all this time in tech and then go write some some tell-all.” Powell catches herself: “It was neither a tell-all or me taking notes,” adding, “I think you kind of have to share the love of it.” She says publishers have expressed interest in a print run, and agents have considered optioning it for film.
Powell says she’s only heard positive feedback from former Google friends. No word, she says, from Pichai, whom she’d alerted about the book before she left last year (“Sundar has better things to worry about,” she says). Officially, Google comms has declined to comment, and, yes, Powell says: “I would have done the same thing.”
Powell is already writing a new satire about a large manufacturing company’s HR department, in which the workers begin plotting each other’s murders, and she is shopping around some short stories about life after the robots take all the jobs. She is also working on a fledgling startup for musicians. Unlike her book’s antiheroine, Powell is CEO.
