So we have to be like a tech company in some ways to be able to do what we do.
If I could tell you the true story of your career, in your first blog post when you took over as president, you said you’d always been a proponent of Signal. I think you said you used RedPhone and TextSecure.
I did.
I tried them at the time, enough to write about them, but they were pretty bad. I’m impressed or maybe a little surprised that you used them back then.
But I was in tech, right? All the cool people in the industry were already using them.
And you were at Google at that time?
Yes. I was working at Google at the time.
What was someone like you doing at Google, honestly?
Have you ever heard of needing money to live and pay rent, Andy?Laughter.) Have you heard of a society where access to resources is limited by your ability to do productive work for one company or another that pays you money?
I get it! But you’re now such an openly anti-Silicon Valley, anti-surveillance capitalist person that it’s hard to imagine…
I’m not anti-technology.
Yeah, I didn’t say that, but how did you get to Google?
Well, I have a BA in rhetoric and English literature from Berkeley. I went to 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 was looking for a job because I graduated from Berkeley and I didn’t have any money. And I put my resume on Monster.com, which, for Gen Z, is like the old-school LinkedIn.
I was interviewing with a few publishers and then Google contacted me for a job as something called… what was it? Consumer Operations Associate?
Consumer Operations Associate?
Yes. What is that? None of those words made any sense. I thought that sounded like a business job.
So, I opened a Gmail account to respond to the recruiter. And then I went through, I think, eight interviews and two weird intelligence tests and a writing test. It was a tough test.
What year was this?
I started in July 2006. Basically, what a “consumer operations associate” meant was a temporary employee in customer service. But no one had ever told me that. And I thought: What is this place? Why is the juice free? Expensive juice is free. I had never been in an environment like that. At that point, Google had reached a tipping point. They had a couple thousand employees and there was a conviction in the culture that they had finally found the recipe for being ethical capitalists, ethical technology. There was a real… complacency is perhaps an ungenerous way of putting it, but it was a strange exuberance. I was just really interested in it.
And at the time, there were a lot of blank checks at Google. They had this 20 percent of the time policy: “If you have a creative idea, bring it to us, we’ll support it”—all this rhetoric that I didn’t know wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously. So I did a lot of maneuvering. I figured out how to meet people who looked interesting. I got into the engineering group. I started working on standards, and I was sort of signing those checks and trying to cash them. And more often than not, people would say, “Well, okay, she came into the room, so let’s just let her cook.” And I ended up learning.