Ms. Powell smartly recognizes a truth that many in the industry elide: A lack of diversity is not just one of several issues for Silicon Valley to fix, but is instead the keystone problem — the source of much else that ails tech, from its recklessly expansionist zeal to the ways its brightest companies keep stepping in problems of their own making.

In short, Silicon Valley’s problem is sameness, stupid — and in Ms. Powell’s telling, we are not going to get a better, more responsible tech industry until we get a more intellectually diverse one.

“I don’t think that everyone has an equal voice,” Ms. Powell said in an interview. “Even putting aside broader issues around gender diversity, ethnic diversity or class diversity, there’s also an issue around people’s educational backgrounds. If you have a hierarchy where engineers are at the very top and the people who are interfacing with the outside world are a couple rungs below that, you really miss something when those people don’t have an equal voice at the table.”

She added: “It’s a monoculture of thought, and that’s a real problem.”

Google declined to comment on Ms. Powell’s book. Badoo did not respond to an inquiry.

Ms. Powell began writing “The Big Disruption” in 2012, as she was moving from Badoo back to Google, where she had worked earlier as a contractor. Her fictional company, Anahata, is something of an amalgam of the two. Like Google, Anahata made it big as a search engine, but now it has a hand in every tech pot, from social media to artificial intelligence to Genie, an app that predicts the future.

Like Larry Page — one of Google’s founders and now the chief executive of its parent company, Alphabet — Anahata’s founder, Bobby Bonilla, is painfully awkward. He prefers to hold meetings in the men’s room, and speaks in big-picture riddles that confuse his underlings.