About
Despite growing up in a posh Massachusetts town, I toughened up and survived being an art student, flight attendant, waitress, bartender, phone book deliverer, corpse transporter, grad student coordinator, administrator along with other gigs across Boston, New York, and cities and towns all the hell over California. In 1998, the founders of Google hired me to work at their little enterprise born in a Menlo Park home, and with her Human Resources help, they grew built a company that went on to do fairly well.
After six years with Google, I scurried back to New England and asked, “Now what?” I enrolled in a graduate program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts, and eventually added that degree to the pile of adding yet another degree to my collection (BFA from MassArt, HR Certificate from UC Berkeley, Baking and Pastry Certificate from Chez Boucher.
I'm passionate about helping disadvantaged women, preserving the oceans and the environment, and supporting the creation and preservation of contemporary art, so she directs her effort and money to Dress for Success, New England Aquarium, New World Foundation, and Peabody Essex Museum.
I'm a co-founder of Pleasant Street LLC, through and built senior housing in Marblehead—the hometown I keep swearing I'll escape but never do.
I question the sanity of anyone who would choose to endure the suffering involved in writing a book.
Featured Work
Employee Number Four, Loving and Leaving Google
You’ve never heard of me, but I was there at the start. I was the herder of those purebred cats, and you might say I’m the mother of the search engine. While I didn’t give birth to the company, didn’t actually conceive and deliver the brilliant ideas that took Google from three guys bouncing on yoga balls to three guys who sat up straight in very expensive office chairs, I did help start the company. I was Google’s first Human Resources manager, I guess. And when I look back on the relative insanity that defined those early days, I smile, shake my head, and thank a plastic Buddha we were never sued over in-office romances or office parties that sometimes featured teeny-skirted administrators writhing on plastic animals and the kinds of beer-blurred offenses that tend to be committed when tightly wound nerds let loose.
I am going to take you into the building, and I am going to pull back a lot of curtains. In this book, you’ll read of people and innovations and disruptions and, yes, parties, but it’s not so much a tale of Google as it is the story of an emotionally battered girl from Boston’s North Shore who wound up with a front row seat to communication and tech history. It’s the story of a girl who grew up bombarded by the message “you’re not good enough” but still learned to take big breaths and jump.
This was a start-up, so I knew I’d likely be out of a job within six months. But whatever was going to happen with the little company born in a nondescript house in that unremarkable neighborhood, whichever turn my life was about to take, I believed it wouldn’t be worse than the ponderous course I’d been on. I’d rather flame out reaching too close to the sun than rust in a prison of my own making.
