Disrupted: Ludicrous Misadventures in the Tech Start-up Bubble

I don't know how to put it, but this is just one of the many perspectives of seeing how the startup world in 2015 was on many occasions: Spending too much to the point it may not be visible whether all the investments will turn around. Finally, some people are starting to realize they were blind, got a pair of new glasses from the doctor, and boy how many cockroaches were they able to find out under the floor from the junk food. Who knows how much cleaning it will take before they can sell the house. All those too sweet to be good companies try to catch those caveats eventually, such as putting strict quotas for people to perform in order to keep their jobs, bringing down people to drink the cool aid as much as they can before they graduate, no different than how we put people to sleep in that old movie "Brave New World".Two things that are striking is how most of the money is being spent on marketing and less on the product, as well how those organization decisions aim too much on company growth at the cost of the people that try to find a good well-earned job. If catering for growth, the company seems so generous like gathering many Oompa Loompas, with the only difference that most who work there in marketing don't learn much what the factory is all about and all they do is looking at numbers and trying to push the most leads. When costs are too much, they get back to their senses that they spent too much and kick all the Oompa Loompas back to the courtyard. That is what the main message I think the author tries to point out: All the sales pitch manifest a big bubble erupting from behind. So to summarize:1. HEART (Humble, Effective, Adaptable, Remarkable, Transparent): Start-ups should focus more on working on the product in some related way. Salesmanship may be a great step than from being a clerk and saying "Hello!" and "Goodbye!". However, would it not be better if people learn how a product works, making them more valuable employees when they transfer to a new job? The problem is not the freedom we give to people, but whether the role expands them to use more their critical thinking or not. I find our communication to others with HEART to be very important in a company culture. But it becomes pointless if the content that we work does not require us to use much of our brain.2. VORP (Value Over Replacement): What is the whole point of the product if people who are working for the product are on the verge? Eventually, all those 20-year-olds will eventually become 30 or 40-year-olds and will not be able to keep up doing that stunt, they will eventually dismiss of having relationships or having kids, they may be brainwashed buying products they don't need. Instead of focusing on the product, shouldn't start-ups focus on making employees the core product of the company as well? VORP may save the product's profitability and sustainability in the market to keep up a great product for a customer. However, look how cruel we are to the customer when the customer is also "actually" an employee, affecting the customer in an indirect way in the "long-term".However, how can some startups like Hubspot can survive with tough deadlines out of the thousands to succeed and become billions in IPO where their product doesn't differentiate much with other competitors? HEART and VORP of course. Let us be honest, the problem is not much of the product but the passive consumers not giving much a dime whether the work they are doing is productive or not. They may even have a fixed mindset that the way they do things is the best, wasting a lot of their time or effort when they didn't buy a software like the one Hubspot has. They actually don't have visibility, not even the determination to change the course of what they are currently doing. Habits are very hard to change, and if you want to change the habits to thousands or even million people to use your product by next year, I don't think that is possible other than to crank a lot of money in advertising to make it visible to the world. This is a challenging problem and I am not sure how we can transition passive consumers to act out alternatives on their own instead of making it visible to them while being a good coach to change their old mindset. Recruiting people with a culture of HEART while making sure only the ones that will be left out is those who can push the product to growth by VORP is the most reasonable team that will have a chance to become a billion company within a few years. Some companies use those tactics also to be the dominating force among rivals. This doesn't work out well in the long term for most of us who want to contribute in our world for the rest of our life or want to have a life outside of work, such as having our own hobby.The author gives a lot of names that may end up having a bad rap. I feel kind of sad how people will perceive Trotsky these days, even though we can all admit his micromanagement was too ruthless. Telling a story of our own experiences is not bad at all, but this content will make it easy for passive consumers to use those words as a dead end for them. This blame, unfortunately, is the main reason why Hubspot and surgeons try to spin mistakes into positive outcomes. In Chapter 12 Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed, people took a tragedy of a baby's death in a blame culture, leaving more vacancies as people had less courage working as social workers for child services, making people less accountable than what the blame was originally intended. The author portraying the story to its true colors is not a problem. The problem is that it may be the same people who mindlessly need a coach to buy in on a product that they also need to be careful how they turn a message of comedy into a blame culture and placing those people as a dead end. That makes it more understandable why in the author's story Hubspot tried to spin all the negative things around. In response, we have to figure how to make a culture that uses less blame, as well companies being more transparent on their mistakes.Grandpa Buzz heard a lot about diversity in Hubspot which he actually never saw. So if we want to have diversity, and not only doing the talk but also the walk, to not only be moral actors but follow righteousness within our HEART, listen to grandpa Buzz advice. Maybe our next startup idea that needs a real fix up is how the old generation can keep having constant joy in the work, as well any employee to have their own time on working on their own hobby, relationships or taking care of a family with children that need to grow up well or a grown family member that needs company. Aren't those more important elements than a product that most people work only advertising it instead of understanding it, in the long term? I leave young entrepreneurs who read this story up to you.

"Disrupted" tells the tale of an over-50, old-school magazine technology journalist's experiences after being hired at a high-tech, fast-growth startup on the East Cost. I am rating this book a 4/5, because it is entertaining, interesting, and a good read. However, if I had to rate my take the validity of Dan's opinion, I'd give it a 2 or a 3.Lyons pulls back the covers on the working conditions inside Hubspot, one of the darlings of the cloud software revolution. And it is a fascinating read. If you've ever wondered what it's like to work in Silicon Valley (even though Hubspot is in Boston, it fits the profile of a SV startup), then this book is for you. In the new economy, companies act and behave very differently than many of the institutions they are replacing.Yet, Dan seems to be unable to grasp this concept. He comes across as whiny, easily-offended, irritable, and a stick-in-the-mud.To be honest, I'm surprised at Dan's surprise on so many aspects of his experience. It makes me wonder how the technology editor at a high-profile magazine like Newsweek could be so clueless on so many basic things, such as...- The culture of a startup that employs so many young people. He is completely stupefied that a segment of the population half his age might have different values, goals, and incentives than someone nearing retirement age. How is this different than any generational gap, in any age, in any industry?- That geeks and techies love, uh, technology. His dressing down of people who enjoyed Google Glass is so condescending, and misses the mark on how new technology often gets into the marketplace. Rarely is version 1 a keeper. Yet I think Dan would be comfortable being the person that was required by law to walk in front of the first "horseless carriages" waving a lantern to warn bystanders of its approach.- Standard accounting principles that govern startups. It is normal and accepted that these companies run at a loss for long periods of time in order to gain market share, and therefore much higher profit down the road. Lyons trounces on this over and over, unable to grasp such a simple concept.- The fact that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a valid platform. He views it with a suspicious eye, like one of those new-fangled kitchen appliances that looks good, but isn't nearly as satisfying as the bottle-opener his grandpa gave him when he is six. For instance, in one place he says, "The bottom line from pro-SaaS believers...", as if there is this religious cult of Cloud followers that have yet to prove it's efficacy. Give it up Dan, the war is over. Cloud won. SaaS is the way of the future.But what really got me, is his hypocrisy. For much of the book, Dan laments the immaturity of the people he works for every day, and the lack of women in leadership roles. In the middle of his experience at Hubspot, he takes a leave of absence to work as a writer in LA for the show "Silicon Valley". While on site at Sony Pictures studio, he says he is "back in the world of grown-ups".Yet, in the *very next paragraph*, he writes the following: "Here, you are allowed to tell dirty jokes and to be a cynical, sarcastic prick. In fact, it's encouraged. Here, everyone is disgusting, and we sit around pitching jokes about enormous cocks."Apparently, in Dan's world, being a "grown-up" consists of up making crude, sexual jokes in front of your co-workers. This is maturity? Seems rather juvenile to me. In fact, it approaches a level that would constitute sexual harassment in my company. This nudge-nudge, wink-wink, "old-boys club" type behavior is exactly the environment that has been responsible for so much of the oppression of women in the workplace for so long. So you'll have to forgive me when I smirk as Dan champions the cause of women, minorities, and maturity in the workplace, like some sort of equal-rights crusader.In fact, Dan seems to have a preoccupation with male genitalia. He talks about them all the time, even claiming Hubspot's logo is full of phallic symbols. It's not. Makes you wonder.I definitely recommend the book. It is clear that Dan is an excellent writer. The book is just the right length, keeps a strong pace throughout, and will make you laugh often as Dan describes some corny aspect of Hubspot's culture, or builds out a caricature of a particular worker.But, at the end of the day, you have to wonder, just who trolled who?-----------I think people tend to rate books higher than they should, so I try to rate books on a harder scale, while being consistent over time. Jerry Foster's book rating scale:5 - Fantastic. Life-altering. Only 10-20 books in a lifetime.4 - Very good.3 - Worth your time.2 - Not very good.1 - Atrocious

“The world of online marketing… has a reputation for being kind of grubby.” A quote from one of my latest reads, Disrupted by Dan Lyons. In this short review I am going to reflect on information that touched me personally. I gave this book five stars not because I enjoyed the authors negative attitude or focus on himself, but because it is an easy, fun read for those of us in the business of developing software delivered on a SaaS basis over the Internet. It is also a must read for people who are curious about how Internet companies can make investors rich while the company actually loses money.In Disrupted, Lyons describes his time at Hubspot, an inbound marketing and sales startup, where he reveals the truth about these seemingly prosperous tech companies by exposing their faults, which have been masked by the mystic and allure that surrounds them.The emphasis of this book focuses on the premise behind venture capital startups and how their motives are solely based heavily on company growth. Aside from interesting facts about how venture capital startups are run, Disrupted points out a curious notion about these new tech companies; they operate using innovative ways to motivate employees while at the same time being abusive by traditional standards. They have the ability to run and grow top line revenues for years without making money. This is due to their business practice of essentially operating as a hamster wheel, ceaselessly running in order to maintain wild growth and sometimes running out of capital until they receive an IPO so original investors can be cashed out. We see this same flow in the early days of major tech companies like Twitter and Facebook. Step one: acquire venture capital. Step two: achieve extraordinarily growth.Dan Lyons explains this business model from the viewpoint of Hubspot.Hubspot was focused on earning around 100M in sales, and used boiler sales rooms to achieve it. There were two parts of the sales process. The first group of people generated Internet content for Hubspots’ blogs to attract leads. These leads were then passed onto the second group of workers who proceeded to cold call the contacts to try to finish the sale. However, what they were selling in the early days, according to Lyons, was not even a platform of quality. Although they received 100M in venture capital at the beginning of their launch, Hubspot struggled with software performance. This is because they stressed generating leads over creating quality software and delivery. This mentality resulted in users having difficulty using the site as well as having the site crash on more than one occasion. Eventually, Hubspot purchased another company with better coders and by 2013, they were selling a better product.Another issue in these types of startups today is how content marketing has become increasingly more focused on quantity versus quality in terms of content. This new age marketing approach is simply having writers flood their website with content for the sole purpose of generating leads. For me, I have been blogging and providing content for eLearning for 10 years and have always taken a serious educational approach when publishing content. However, if generating more content is the new strategy for creating more leads, where is the quality control when these companies are pumping out blog content? These companies should be asking themselves: Are you providing serious content or are you just manipulating your audience for lead generation?Lyons explains our current reality in marketing, “instead of spending money on traditional marketing, things like buying advertising and cold calling customers, companies publish blogs and websites and videos, and use online content to draw customers toward them.” I agree with generating blogs and web content as a way for those in the tech industry to market to consumers, but we need to make sure that there is substance. On what level are you providing value to your viewers? At what point does generating content simply turn into manipulation for gaining leads?From the perspective from someone in their 50s, Lyons gives insights into the hidden culture of startups revealing how managers treat their employees. There are few women in top leadership roles, essentially no diversity within the office space, and they battle high turnover rates. At Hubspot, the layoffs weren’t much better. An email would be sent to the rest of the staff explaining that an employee had “graduated,” or, in other words, been terminated. This new terminology gave another reason for Lyons to criticize the management. He felt that there was a lot of Orwellian “double speak.” In his opinion the deception of not calling things by what they really were simply attempts to sugar coat what they were doing. For example, Hubspot claimed that “cold calling is dead,” yet, they had these “boiler rooms” of solicitors calling their website leads.Overall, the major contribution to this book is how Lyons elegantly describes how difficult it is to see fact from fiction inside of these startups. The venture capitalists paint a picture of tech companies like Microsoft and Apple and how their employees got rich when they finally made it big. These new startups, like Hubspot, showcase their stock options, manipulating this facade of how their employees can make it just as big as the first dot-com era startups. Unfortunately, this mystic allure of tech companies is what many recent grads cling to when applying to startups, and many find themselves disappointed when stock options become diluted. At the end of the day the main goal of these startups is all about reaching a scale; to be able to generate enough growth that will cash out the venture capitalists.The book was an easy and entertaining read, and it certainly did not disappoint. I loved reading as Lyons uncovered the hypocrisies within this new era of startups as well as the grunginess of the content marketing mirage. This is a good read for all those involved in tech and also business. Disrupted encourages us to see past the façade that surrounds the Silicon Valley and to view their business models and concepts from a more critical stance. A lot of what goes on in Silicon Valley is mysterious and alluring. However, Lyons reveals the dark side of the Valley’s contribution to management and the new era of content marketing.

Thanks, Dan Lyons. Now Anyone Over 40 Really IS Unemployable in Hhigh-TechI have to admit that when I read a while ago that Dan Lyons had been hired by HubSpot, I was gob smacked. I mean, Dan Lyons, former technology editor for Newsweek, which itself was started at the same time Moses was publishing the Ten Commandments, is old. How old? He’s over 50. Do you know old 50+ plus is in high-tech?Those dinosaur fossils at the natural history museums? Infants compared to Dan. The therapsids? Children. Diploceraspis? (They look exactly like they sound). Teenagers. The only prehistoric life contemporaneous with Dan is maybe the Archaea, Latin for “Live Goo in a Jar.” When he showed up at HubSpot for his first day of work, he didn’t need at a spot at an open desk. A warm petri dish would have done just fine.You have to give HubSpot a great deal of credit for hiring Dan. I mean, if a triceratops showed up for a job interview at your shiny startup, would you hire it? I don’t think so. Now, maybe you should hire that dinosaur. This giant reptile might be the hottest Ruby on Rails coder out there and can even prove it! But then then you look down at its resume and spot that once upon a time, it wrote a program in UCSD Pascal. A little red flag goes up and after asking the requisite number of questions to avoid the appearance of violating U.S. job discrimination laws, you smile brightly at the ceratopsid in front of you, help direct its 12 ton body out of your office and building, and promptly consign the resume to the virtual circular file.But this didn’t happen at HubSpot. They hired Dan at a decent salary and gave him a pre IPO stock package that came in at around $60K. (HubSpot went public in 2014 at $25 per share and now trades between $40 to $45, a tidy return on an initial investment.) When he showed up for his first day of work, we find out that the company offers its employees, among other things, free food, free beer, exercise rooms, unlimited vacations and fully paid for Blue Cross health insurance.(There’s a word some people use for a workplace providing the aforementioned perks.That word is “Heaven.”)Alas, things didn’t work out between HubSpot and Dan and for its troubles, the company ended up with a big sharp PR horn shoved up its fundament, its marketing chief was fired for apparently trying to filch an unreleased manuscript of the book, Dan’s boss was fired, and HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan received a stern dressing down from the company’s board and was made to go stand in a corner. Oh, and the FBI is criminally investigating the whole mess. (I really think the Bureau has better things to do with its time.)Somehow, it just doesn’t seem fair. To HubSpot.I’ve read Disrupted and believe any fair observer will conclude the company was royally trolled. Dan gives the game away in the first chapter of the book. In this section,the things he learns include:* He will be working with and under people younger than himself. Dan believes this is beneath Dan.* He dislikes the color orange and the HubSpot logo, which he thinks resembles a penis. It doesn’t, but Dan has a point to make.* He doesn’t like the fact that HubSpot sells a package of inbound marketing services aimed at small and medium sized businesses so they can sell, as he puts it, “more stuff.” One wonders why Dan accepted a job at the company, as HubSpot makes no attempt to hide its business model.* He’s upset the company founders don’t meet him in person to conduct his first-day orientation. I didn’t feel bad for Dan when I read this. My first day of work at the first company I worked for, sometime during the early Carboniferous, the guy who hired me had already been fired. This is high-tech, Big Guy.* That when you put a group of hormonally charged 20 and 30 somethings working at a high-pressure startup in close proximity to one another, they will want to have sex. And do so. Sometimes at work. This, of course, never happened in a place such as Newsweek.* Sales people in high-tech companies like to have wild parties.* HubSpot has a telemarketing arm that makes lots of phone calls, the reps read from scripts, and their performance is measured. This is the journalistic equivalent of reporting that humans breathe air.* HubSpot doesn’t use cube farms, but prefers to arrange its offices in “open desk” configurations. Not even upper management is allocated offices.* Employees are allowed to bring their dogs to work.* HubSpot is not profitable.* HubSpot has an internal corporate culture it promotes to its employees.Upon reading this, my first reaction was “Dan, you were the chief technology guy for Newsweek, wrote about the industry for Forbes, and are part of the writing staff for the TV show Silicon Valley for chrissakes. What was your beat all that time? IBM mainframe marketing?Let’s take ageism first. Perhaps Dan only discovered this phenomenon when he first went to work for HubSpot, but some of us have known about the situation for a long time. Take this excerpt from my book, In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters. I wrote this in 2006 for the second edition, back when I was a therapsid:"High tech is awash with barely disguised age discrimination. High tech companies vigorously deny this because U.S. law forbids age discrimination; the companies, of course, are lying. In most cases, if you decide to make a career in high technology, you will be fawned over whilst in your 20s and respected until your late 30s. At age 40+, if you have not escaped into upper management, it is assumed you will be either a) rich from the money you made working for a hot start-up or b) preparing for a second career, perhaps as a fries preparation specialist at the food court of your local mall. At 50+ a perk of your job will include a shiny new shovel, with which you are expected to dig your own grave, jump in, and then drag the dirt over on top of you. If you are 60+ and are spotted in the halls of a high-technology company, it is assumed you are either a) the grandparent of an employee or b) a ghost."I suspect Dan is having some fun with us with the age stuff. It would have taken him about five minutes on Google to discover the average age of the people he’d be working with at HubSpot. But perhaps Dan is too old to use the Internet? In that case, he could have simply visited HubSpot HQ and taken a look around.Rest of post up at:[...]

Dan Lyons is an awesomely talented storyteller and smartass. He was the Fake Steve Jobs and wrote a book on that. He’s a writer for HBO’s Silicon Valley.Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble is a diverting and revealing story, vividly told. Dan starts by losing his job as technology editor at Newsweek and, soon after, leaving a management position at ReadWrite. At age 52, as he puts it, “Losing my job sent me into a tailspin.” So he interviews with Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the leaders of HubSpot, a “powerful, easy to use, integrated set of applications for businesses to attract, engage, and delight customers.” In other words, HubSpot makes cloud-based marketing tools.HubSpot focuses on inbound marketing, which means activities you undertake to draw customers to you, such as blogging and social media. HubSpot also helps small and medium-sized companies to manage the leads which that activity generates, nurture them, and sell to them. The CMO hires Dan as a marketing fellow, to write blog content and advise management.The best thing about this book is the nakedness of the story. Dan holds nothing back in his descriptions of his coworkers and, most importantly, in his description of his own feelings and emotions as he goes though this epic saga. It’s written in the present tense, which makes it feel more real.Disrupted is a tragedy. Dan finds HubSpot filled with enthusiastic, inexperienced workers, nearly all white and very young, who operate in an orange-colored frenzy of passion for the company’s mission. The senior managers who hired him don’t have time to manage him; somebody much younger ends up as his boss. They can’t figure out what to do with him; he’s overqualified for everything they throw at him. He hangs onto the job for appearances, having a salary, and health insurance.The hinge of this story is culture clash. HubSpot is about moving fast, growth, and a go-go culture that, as Dan tells it, values enthusiasm and “teamwork” over efficiency, strategy, or profit. Dan is an experienced journalist whom the rest of the workers just can’t seem to puzzle out. He’s got a wife and kids, while they’re hard-charging “bros” and young women who all seem to wear the same clothes and have the same haircut.Dan’s perceptions of the misunderstandings, personality clashes, bizarre incidents, social media faux pas, and HubSpot’s cult of belief make the story come alive. And when the fun is over and he finally leaves HubSpot, there’s even an epilogue about an FBI investigation of people allegedly attempting to hack computers and steal the manuscript.Is it true? The facts match what I’ve seen. But everyone has their own perspective on the truth. People who were there tell me that context is missing. Dharmesh has written his own rebuttal.HubSpot has a dedicated customer base and its products have a lot more value than Disrupted implies. (They claim revenue retention exceeded 100% for 2015, which implies happy customers — upsell is exceeding churn.) But I have no trouble believing that the chaotic environment Dan describes was real.If you want to decry age discrimination in technology, lack of diversity, profitless startups, stupid investors, greedy VCs, bubble mentality, and the venality of technology leaders, you can fuel your concerns with this book. But I don’t think whining — or this book — will change much; the current system is making a lot of money for a lot of people and churning out successful innovations from Facebook to Tesla to Uber, employing millions. It’s a terrible system that chews up people like Dan and leaves the rubble of broken startups littering the landscape. That’s just how it works.But you can learn from this. Dan made plenty of mistakes (and fearlessly documented his own failures here). And HubSpot did a bunch of stupid things, too. So after you’ve finished this entertaining story, don’t just smile. Do things differently.If you want to do more than read this book -- if you want to learn from it -- go to bernoff.com and search for "Dan Lyons". You'll see a list of lessons from the book.