'I wanted to go after big tech': ex-Google exec's novel rips Silicon Valley

It was once Jessica Powell's job to defend Google. Now she's taking her industry to task in a 'totally fictional but essentially true' book

In September, Jessica Powell tapped on her phone's contact list and texted her old boss, the Google CEO, Sundar Pichai. She also called a former co-worker at the company's roughly 200-person communications team that, until last September, she led. Powell's news: she was about to release a satirical novel about Silicon Valley, which readers would be likely to interpret as being about Google. The book, The Big Disruption, was billed as "a totally fictional but essentially true Silicon Valley story". In public relations terms, it was a rogue turn - going from burnishing the company's image to lampooning a company that looked suspiciously like it.

Powell, 40, nursed some eleventh-hour nerves about the transition. Until last fall, Powell was on Google's management team as vice-president of global communications, crafting strategy on how its policies and products should be presented and defended. After a career as the behind-the-scenes puppet master of corporate messaging and a bout of wanting to publish anonymously, she decided to put her name front and center. She didn't want to irk Google friends, and even penned an introductory essay that argues you can love tech and still see its flaws. Powell insists the book is not a thinly veiled "tell-all" and that her distancing the book from Google is not one final act of PR.