Employee Number Four

For fans of Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog, a satirical memoir in which Google’s fourth employee recounts first navigating a tumultuous childhood, then finding herself in a front-row seat as her brilliant friends make high-tech history—and change the world.

With her spotty work history and seemingly useless art degree, Heather Cairns was not an obvious hire for a tech start-up that would one day change the world as we know it. But Cairns’s turbulent, lower-middle-class upbringing and various lousy early-adulthood jobs armed her with a skill that turned out to be just what she needed as Google’s fourth employee and head of HR: a knack for reeling in adults who were acting like children in the midst of a seriously chaotic environment.

Employee Number Four reveals how childhood adversity can forge the resilience needed to survive a start-up’s tumultuous early days—and offers a unique behind-the-scenes look at the folks who built Google. Cairns pulls no punches as she shares what it was like to work for eccentric geniuses whose brilliance was matched only by their all-too-human mishaps and shenanigans, even as she earnestly depicts the magic of being present for Google’s exhilarating early days. A tale of corporate survival recounted with a wry smile by someone who lived to tell it, this is the real Silicon Valley—and it’s even funnier than fiction.