Claire Hughes Johnson ’90

Near the end of 2014, Claire moved from her role as vice-president at Google[x] to manage the business operations at Stripe, a start-up online payment services company.

The self-driving car project is part of the Google[x] division—the so-called moonshot factory that pursues revolutionary concepts. In 2012, the group released a video of a self-driving Toyota Prius squiring a blind man around town. Since then, however, they have kept their advances quiet. Claire, a Google veteran who helped launch flagship products like Gmail, had been following the project internally, but it wasn’t until last year that Google[x] director Astro Teller and engineer Chris Urmson convinced her to join them. Her mandate is to bring the technology to market, but she can’t divulge how Google intends to do that. So, in the meantime, one of her roles is to act as an evangelist for the technology, showing regulators, politicians, and the general public how selfdriving cars could benefit the world.

— from “The Moonshot Evangelist,” by Greg Mone,
Milton Magazine, Fall 2014