Claire Stapleton was nicknamed "the Bard of Google" while at the company.Courtesy of Claire StapletonClaire Stapleton led the 2018 Google walkouts over the company's handling of sexual misconduct allegations.Her new book, "Don't be Evil," captures her time at Google and the "fake promises" of Google life.She talked to Business Insider about Google's obsession with its image, worker power, and more.In 2018, Claire Stapleton helped spearhead a walkout of around 20,000 Google employees. The protest was a response to a New York Times story detailing how the company had paid multimillion-dollar exit packages to executives accused of sexual misconduct.Now she's back with a memoir, "Don't Be Evil," that pulls back the curtain on her time in the trenches at Google. It comes as the company faces renewed employee activism over its work with the Pentagon and ICE, and departing talent as it reshuffles its AI leadership.Stapleton joined Google in 2007 and worked on internal communications, where her quippy, humorous companywide emails earned her the internal nickname "the Bard of Google." At the time of the mass employee walkouts, Stapleton was a marketing manager at Google-owned YouTube. She left Google in 2019, writing at the time that she believed the company had retaliated against her over her activism.In many ways, Stapleton helped shape Google's image internally. She talked to Business Insider about those early days at the tech giant, which, while successful in its aims to organize the world's information, later found its utopian ideals undermined by corporate realities. Google vowed not to become a conventional company, but sticking to that promise proved harder than its founders may have anticipated.The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Google did not respond to a Business Insider request for comment.The book has this central tension between Google's utopian self-image versus a pattern of bad management and lack of tolerance for dissent. Do you think Google was ever really the company it believed itself to be?Claire Stapleton: I think that there's a lot of curiosity about whether the founding principles and philosophy were sincere, or if it was always kind of a ploy to squeeze more out of the workers.Google had this promise that innovation and tech can solve all these problems in the world, and also an interest in creating a company culture that supported that — not just through having top talent, keeping them happy, and having them creating and firing all cylinders. It was just like, "green light, go" in all these different lanes for the company as it moved through the world.Google employees took to the streets in 2018 to protest the company's handling of sexual misconduct allegations.Bloomberg/Getty ImagesSo I think that there are always tensions and contradictions in that. I read this amazing book called "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" by Fred Turner, a Stanford professor. He talks about how one of the great ironies and contradictions of the tech industry is that they started in this quite countercultural way. There was this distrust of centralized power, democratic institutions — everything was about decentralizing.Even Mark Zuckerberg's op-ed about AI uses the same language about how the future is for everyone. Meanwhile, these companies have consolidated tons of power, and it's all centralized. It's like they've become institutions, in and of themselves, with tremendous impact on society. So how does that square? How can these people who set out to be the leaders of this guerrilla movement for societal transformation now sit atop trillion-dollar companies?You're in good company — there's been a run of books about Silicon Valley's darker side.CS: People keep saying, "Wow, this is amazing timing for this book because there's so much going on with Google." The company remains a sort of bellwether of the economy, but also how attitudes toward work have changed, how the public ingests a company as big and successful as Google is.How much did you feel that sentiment against Big Tech shift by the time you left Google?CS: The last year that I was there, something was fomenting. I think Trump's first term started to make Google look less sure of its values and its virtues, and I think that there were some changes in the culture that were happening as the company was reckoning with becoming so big and more corporate.Where does transparency sit? How does the culture evolve? I think that was spurring this very strange thing where employees were feeling a loss of identity.Google's Sundar Pichai was one of many tech CEOs to attend Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2025.Julia Demaree Nikhinson / POOL / AFP via Getty ImagesIf I could say it's one thing, it's that Google maintained a startup feeling even though it was a big company. But somehow these tech companies have become the infrastructure of the world, and the people that run them are like heads of state.Looking back, what do you see as th
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