So in order to do what we do, we need to look like a technology company in some ways.
I want to ask you about the actual story of your career. In your first blog post when you became president, you said that you’d always been a proponent of Signal. I think you said that you’d used RedPhone and TextSecure.
I did so.
I tried them enough at the time to write about them, but they were pretty unstable! I’m impressed that you used them back then, but it might be a bit odd.
But I was in tech, right? All the great people in tech were already using them.
Were you at Google at that time?
Yes, I was at Google at the time.
Honestly, what was someone like you doing at Google?
Andy, have you ever heard that you need money to live and pay rent?smile.) Have you ever heard of a society where your access to resources is limited by your ability to work productively for a company that will pay you?
I get that! But it’s hard to imagine that now that you’re so vocal about being against Silicon Valley and surveillance capitalism…
I’m not anti-technology.
Well, I’m not saying that, but how did you end up at Google?
Well, I got a degree in Rhetoric and English Literature from Berkeley. I’ve been in art school my whole life. I wasn’t looking for a job in tech. I wasn’t really interested in tech at the time, but I graduated from Berkeley and I had no money, so I was looking for a job. And I put my resume on Monster.com, which is like the old-fashioned LinkedIn for Gen Z.
I interviewed with a few publishers and then I got contacted by Google and they hired me as what they called a… what was it called, Consumer Operations Associate?
Are you a Consumer Operations Associate?
Yeah. What is that? None of that makes sense. I just thought it was like a business thing.
So I set up a Gmail account to respond to recruiters. Then I had eight interviews, two weird IQ tests, and one written test. It was a tough ordeal.
What year was this?
I joined the company in July 2006. As it turns out, a “Consumer Operations Associate” was a temporary customer support associate. But no one told me that. So I thought, “What if I was a consumer operations associate?” What kind of place is this? Why is the juice free? Expensive juice is free. I’d never been in that environment. Google was at a tipping point at that point. We had several thousand employees. And there was a belief in the culture that ethical capitalists, ethical technology, had finally found the secret. There was a real — I don’t think I’d call it complacency, but there was a weird enthusiasm. I was just so interested in it.
At that time, Google had a lot of blank checks lying around. They had a 20 percent time limit. “If you have a creative idea, bring it to us. We’ll help you.” I didn’t know to take this rhetoric seriously. So I got creative. I found ways to meet interesting people. I got in engineering groups. I started working on standards, but in a way, I was just signing checks and trying to cash them. A lot of times people were like, “Well, okay, she’s in the room, let her do it.” And I started to learn.
