Disrupted, My Misadventure in the Start-up Bubble was written by veteran journalist Dan Lyons. Lyons worked in print journalism for many years until he was laid off by Newsweek magazine as a part of the long-term death of ink-on-paper. In an attempt to reinvent himself and start another career as a marketer, he landed a job at a start-up called HubSpot. When he joined HubSpot at the age of 52 the average age of the other employees was 26.
The author had spent a couple of decades covering technology businesses and interviewing captains of industry, so he knows business. But what he found at HubSpot was something different and disorienting. The place was decorated like a pre-school. Everyone worked in large open spaces, crammed closely together with no private offices. Meetings were constant and job responsibilities were unclear. Management didn’t know what they were doing.
HubSpot is a real company based in Cambridge (Boston area), Massachusetts. They sell cloud-based software that uses social media and search engine optimization to drive eyeballs to websites, where (hopefully) these eyeballs turn into leads, then customers, then evangelists. HubSpot says they are creating a revolution, a movement and changing the world. What they are really doing is facilitating small businesses to send out spam. HubSpot customers send one billion spam emails a month. And they do this using lousy software. Of course, HubSpot doesn’t call these emails spam; they call them ‘lovable marketing content.’ It is pretty hard to take these people seriously and the author doesn’t.
HubSpot is mostly a high pressure sales machine. For young people who haven’t worked elsewhere, they are convinced it is awesome. There is even a 128-slide PowerPoint deck called “The HubSpot Culture Code: Creating a Company We Love.” It was written by one of the founders, Dharmesh Shah, who never works at HubSpot and uses the deck mostly as a sales tool for investors. Shah is also the creator of an acronym HEART, standing for humble, effective, adaptable, remarkable and transparent. Hubspot is none of these things but no matter, it’s all window dressing.
To attract customers, HubSpot has a ‘Content Factory,’ which is where the author of this book starts his misadventure. This is where people write trite drivel in the form of blog posts and e-books. All to lure people to the HubSpot website in hopes they will make the mistake of leaving contact information. Then the sales people in the boiler room start their high pressure calls.
At one point they even created a Blog Topic Generator in which one could type in three to five words and a computer would spit out three potential headlines. From these headlines, presumably, one could write a blog post. For example, when they tried the BTG by typing in Cervical Cancer Awareness Month, the BTG suggested:
Why We Love Cervical Cancer
(And You Should Too!)
and
Miley Cyrus and Cervical Cancer:
10 Things They Have in Common
There is plenty at HubSpot that is inane and stupid, actually virtually everything they do, but the worst has to be what they call ‘graduation.’ This is a euphemism for termination. This happens all the time without warning to the person ‘graduating.’ An email comes around announcing that a person is ‘graduating’ and that ‘we look forward to seeing how s/he uses their superpowers in their next big adventure.’ In other words, they got fired with no warning.
Eventually, ‘Grandpa Buzz,’ as the author is dubbed by his co-workers half his age, graduates too. It was inevitable for an adult in such a ridiculous environment. But there are two subsequent events one wouldn’t expect.
First, HubSpot successfully went public, the founders and venture capitalists made a ton of money, and the company now has a market capitalization of over $2 billion. (Try Google Finance if you want to learn about any public company.) HubSpot is what is called a ‘Unicorn.’ And this is a company that has never made a profit and probably never will. If this sounds like the dot com bubble of the 1990s, it is, except this time the bubble is much bigger. Easy money for the last several years and the search for returns on that money have fueled a frenzy of start-ups that make no business sense. It seems inevitable that this has to come crashing down at some point.
Second, when HubSpot learned that Dan Lyons was writing a book at his experience at HubSpot, some HubSpot executives launched an attempt to get a copy of the book early to learn what it said. The truth never came out (See transparency as a company value—Ha!) but the FBI investigated and the board fired the Chief Marketing Officer, another executive resigned and the CEO was sanctioned by the board of directors but retained. The best guess is that the author’s computer was hacked and, possibly, someone attempted to bribe an employee of the publisher in an attempt to get a copy of the manuscript. Whatever the FBI found, it was not prosecuted and remains secret.
The book is a well written and Lyons is a natural storyteller. I recommend it as both entertainment and a cautionary tale.
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