- Jill Hazelbaker has gone from representing powerful political figures like John McCain and Michael Bloomberg to tech giants Google, Snap, and Uber.
- Hazelbaker’s path from politics to Silicon Valley is typical in PR, but her rapid rise has impressed the public relations industry.
- Business Insider spoke to 11 of her current and former colleagues and friends, who attributed her ascent to her loyalty, pragmatism, and composure.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
On Jill Hazelbaker’s first day at Google in 2010, she got handed a crisis.
Hazelbaker, then 29, had been hired as the company’s PR director. Her prior work experience was in politics, managing communications for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, followed by Michael Bloomberg.
Her boss at Google, Rachel Whetstone, phoned with an urgent message. Google was relocating its search business to Hong Kong, a move fraught with huge implications for free speech and its relationship with the Communist Party in China.
“You need to get over here if you want to be part of this,” Whetstone said, according to a close associate at the time. “We need you here. The train is leaving the station.”
Hazelbaker sped to a meeting that included Whetstone, then-chief legal officer David Drummond, and then-CEO Eric Schmidt.
“Jill never got fazed about things,” the source said. “She was diving into the details and asking good questions. After that, she helped brief it out to the press on the phone.”
Hazelbaker, now 39, went from Google to Snap, then on to become Uber’s top flack where she oversees marketing and public policy. As SVP of marketing and public affairs, she has close relationships with CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, his top lieutenants, and the board. She is one of four executives who were hired during Travis Kalanick’s CEO reign at Uber and who has remained.
In late May, she sold half her Uber shares, worth an eye-popping $8.6 million, a sum that underscores her rapid ascent and accumulation of power.
Business Insider spoke to eleven of Hazelbaker’s close associates and former colleagues and two industry observers on Hazelbaker’s rise to become one the most powerful people in PR. Eight of these source, who are known to Business Insider, were granted anonymity in order to talk freely.
“Jill is a powerhouse of an executive,” Khosrowshahi told Business Insider in an email. “She holds herself, her team and everyone around her to ridiculously high standards which she and they somehow exceed; she has an unwavering commitment to substance over spin; and she is not only a key part of Uber and the transformation we have undergone, but an invaluable advisor to me personally.”
Hazelbaker, who is on maternity leave for her third child, was unavailable for this story.
Hazelbaker got into politics while in college
Like other top PR pros, Hazelbaker started her career in politics. She grew up in Salem, Oregon, a daughter of Becky Hazelbaker and Lance Hazelbaker, who founded a tire shop, Cascade Tire Pros, that he still runs.
While attending the University of Oregon, she interned for Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), according to The Oregonian. She also worked for Sen. Gordon Smith’s 2002 re-election campaign and Republican Jim Zupancic in his campaign against Rep. Darlene Hooley (D-OR).
A college friend remembered her as being serious at a young age. “She had presence, was at ease with herself, and had a command of group dynamics. She had an understanding of who she was, which was unique even in college.”
Hazelbaker made her mark on John McCain’s presidential campaign
Her political career wasn’t blemish-free. While she was working for Thomas Kean Jr.’s campaign against Senator Bob Menendez in New Jersey in 2006, a liberal blog called Blue Jersey alleged someone on the Kean campaign, possibly Hazelbaker, was posing as Democrats posting comments on the blog’s website.
Hazelbaker denied the accusations to The New York Times at the time.
Hazelbaker went on to work for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, where she was credited with helping turn around his flailing bid during the 2008 Republican presidential primaries. Several key aides and advisers had resigned, and by July 2007, Hazelbaker was one of the last staffers left.
McCain promoted Hazelbaker from New Hampshire communications director to be his national comms director, betting she could translate New Hampshire’s momentum to the rest of the campaign, said a former campaign staffer. Hazelbaker convinced a couple staffers to return or stay, and the campaign roared back to life.
“This could be fun,” she told one former staff member, whose identity is known to Business Insider. “There are no more adults around.”
“McCain doubled down on New Hampshire and he bet big on Jill,” said Tucker Bounds, the former national spokesperson for the McCain campaign. “That team delivered, and Jill has been the boss ever since.”
It didn’t end well for McCain. He ended up making a controversial VP pick with Sarah Palin and lost the election. The lesson for Hazelbaker and others was that you can’t take shortcuts, said a former campaign aide.
“No one that survived that experience can go forward without learning the real lessons of the rigor and skepticism you have to apply when you make decisions under duress,” the former campaign aide said. “That carried forward not only for Jill but a bunch of other people who moved onto higher level positions.”
Hazelbaker went on to work for Michael Bloomberg’s campaign
A month after McCain conceded to Barack Obama, Hazelbaker went on to help New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s campaign for a third term in 2009. The City Council had overturned term limits for New York mayors, letting him run for a controversial third term.
Hazelbaker’s pragmatic and middle-of-the-road political stance served her well there, said a Democratic operative that worked on the campaign.
“You never had to worry about in-fighting or some of the things you read about in campaigns,” the operative said.
Under Hazelbaker, the strategy was to make Bloomberg look like he was running a low-key campaign — despite him spending large sums of his own money on the race.
“New York is an overwhelmingly Democratic city,” said a former campaign staffer. “The goal was to focus Mike on being mayor and engaged in good government pursuits, and to make the campaign as much of a non-issue as possible.”
Bloomberg defeated Bill Thompson to win a third term, and Hazelbaker joined Google one month later.
Hazelbaker liked to tell people: “You never want to get in the way of your own momentum,” a lifelong friend of hers recalled.
At Google, Hazelbaker grappled with free speech issues
On her first day, Hazelbaker helped handle Google’s Hong Kong announcement.
In 2014, she was senior director of communications and public policy for the EMEA region when another tough situation hit Google. The European Union Court of Justice heard a case about the “right to be forgotten,” involving a Spanish man who wanted Google to delete his personal information from the search engine.
The court ruled in favor of the man, to Google’s shock. At 2 a.m., Hazelbaker phoned headquarters to deliver the news.
Hazelbaker’s approach, instead of “thrashing around and railing against free expression,” was for Google to recognize Europe’s social mores and its history of free speech issues that differ vastly from the US’s, said a former Google employee.
Google set up a commission, held hearings, invited expert opinions, and implemented recommendations, said the former employee who had direct knowledge of those conversations.
“Your natural inclination is to shuttle out a statement as soon as possible,” said the former employee. “Jill said, ‘We should sit and see where this is going.’ It played out exactly as she predicted. We ran a smart strategy so we didn’t look like the asshole American company coming to bang on free speech.”
Hazelbaker spent a year at Snap
In 2014, Hazelbaker jumped to Snap as VP of comms and public policy to gain tech startup experience, according to a close associate who requested anonymity.
At the secretive messaging app company, she earned colleagues’ respect for having a strong relationship with the press while keeping the media in line, according to a former Snap executive.
But her scope was limited; Snap kept a low press profile and PR was excluded from founder and CEO Evan Spiegel’s close circle of lieutenants, this person said. Hazelbaker left for Uber in 2015, following her former Google boss, Whetstone to Uber.
“She wanted to have more of an impact at a different company,” the former Snap employee said. “I’m sure she’s much more involved in M&A and other things at Uber than she would be at Snap.”
At Uber, Hazelbaker got praise for staying through crises
Two years after joining the fast-growing ride-hailing service, Hazelbaker found herself dealing with a string of scandals.
Uber suspended price surges during the New York Taxi Workers Alliance’s strike against President Trump’s travel ban, leading a reported 200,000 users to delete the app from their phones.
Then, former employee Susan Fowler went public with her experiences of sexual harassment and sexism at Uber, igniting a public discussion about culture at Uber and Silicon Valley at large.
Then came founder Travis Kalanick’s infamous argument with an Uber driver and the Greyball scandal, a secret tool Uber used to evade law enforcement in cities where regulators were trying to block its app. Then Waymo sued Uber, alleging it stole intellectual property.
Hazelbaker scored points for staying during a crisis-filled period.
“Even in the early days, Jill always understood the obligation is to the company, shareholders, and employees,” said Matt Kallman, head of communications at Uber.
She was among six members of Uber’s executive leadership team that sent a letter calling for, among other things, Kalanick to take a leave of absence after reports over how Eric Alexander, Uber’s president for Asia-Pacific, handled a passenger’s 2014 rape by a driver.
After an uprising by some of its biggest investors, Kalanick resigned as CEO in June 2017. Uber hired Khosrowshahi, diversified its workforce and leadership, and replaced members of its board.
Uber’s reforms culminated in a 2019 safety report, which found there were 3,000 sexual assaults in rides in 2018. In an hour-long meeting in the spring of 2018, Kallman said he, Hazelbaker, Khosrowshahi, chief legal officer Tony West, and others weighed whether to publish it, given Uber’s already tarnished reputation.
Hazelbaker had said publishing the report would help rebuild public trust in Uber and drive down future incidents of sexual assault by promoting awareness of the issue. Her point was that if Uber wanted to change its narrative, it had to make internal moves first, Kallman said.
After major cities like London decided not to renew Uber’s operating license, Kallman said Hazelbaker also helped steward a less confrontational approach post-2017 when dealing with municipal governments.
And when Uber’s IPO cratered in 2019, causing it to lose more money than any company going public since 1975, Hazelbaker pushed for Khosrowshahi to do press interviews to shift attention to the company’s future, according to a Hazelbaker associate.
Bill Gurley, a former Uber board member who was instrumental in ousting Kalanick, said Hazelbaker also helped the company recoup some of its losses by organizing a call with analysts. Over the next week, the stock went up 80%, Gurley said.
In June 2019, Hazelbaker was promoted to head up Uber’s global marketing. Gurley said Hazelbaker moved fast to make top hires like TripAdvisor’s Mike Strickman and Google’s Thomas Ranese and slash marketing staff well before the rest of the company made cuts.
Gurley said Hazelbaker’s loyalty and knowledge of the company have made her indispensable to Uber during a tumultuous time.
“If you look at the journey that the company’s been on from when she joined to today, it’s like three or four different lifetimes,” Gurley said.
“When the winds shift as dramatically as they did in 2017, it’s easy for a lot of hired-in executives to say, ‘This is too much, I’m out of here,’ as opposed to buckling down and seeing the company through it.”