Don't Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech

Summary

"An absolute must-read for anyone interested not just in big tech, but in what it takes to not lose your soul in modern-day America." —Naomi Fry, staff writer at The New Yorker

A whip-smart, darkly funny, and timely memoir of one woman’s twelve years inside Google and her transformation from insider to dissenter as the company’s ideals begin to unravel from within.

When Claire Stapleton joined Google in 2007, it felt like stepping into a worldview as much as a job. The company offered not just a career, but a moral project. In the heady early years of Big Tech and when Google’s in-house slogan was “Don’t be evil,” it was easy to believe that technology wasn’t just changing the world—it was going to fix it.

Stapleton quickly became known as the “Bard of Google,” pulled into the rooms where the company narrated itself—writing speeches, blog posts, and executive communications for leaders including Larry Page. As she rose through increasingly rarefied roles, from the storied Creative Lab to YouTube marketing, she helped shape the myth from the inside.

But as the gap between Google’s ideals and its reality widened, the dissonance became impossible to ignore. In 2018, amid outrage over the company’s handling of sexual harassment, Stapleton helped organize the 20,000-employee Google Walkout—a defining rupture in Silicon Valley’s self-image that The New York Times called a “watershed moment in tech.” Overnight, she became a public face of employee revolt—and no longer someone the company could neatly fold back into its story.

Sharp, witty, and unsparing, Don’t Be Evil is an insider’s account of how power actually works—and a deeper reckoning with the stories we tell about work, purpose, and ourselves. In a culture that collapses identity into work, and as tech elites blur the line between private authority and public life, it asks: how much can you change from within—and when is it time to walk away?