Employee Number Four

With a spotty work history and a useless art degree, Heather Cairns was the last person anyone would have pegged to be an early employee of the company that would rewire the modern world. But a turbulent lower-middle-class upbringing and a string of spectacularly lousy jobs had given her something no résumé could capture: an uncanny ability to manage brilliant, impossible people in the middle of total chaos. Which, as it turned out, was the only job description that mattered at Google. 

Employee Number Four is the story of what really happened inside those walls—before the IPO, before the mythology, before the world knew the name. As Google’s first head of HR, Cairns had a front-row seat to the genius, the dysfunction, and the magnificent, bewildering mess of building something from nothing. She pulls no punches: the founders were visionary, volatile, and frequently in need of an adult. She was, improbably, that adult.