Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
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Overview
For twenty-five years Dan Lyons was a magazine writer at the top of his professionuntil one Friday morning when he received a phone call: Poof. His job no longer existed. "I think they just want to hire younger people," his boss at Newsweek told him. Fifty years old and with a wife and two young kids, Dan was, in a word, screwed. Then an idea hit. Dan had long reported on Silicon Valley and the tech explosion. Why not join it? HubSpot, a Boston start-up, was flush with $100 million in venture capital. They offered Dan a pile of stock options for the vague role of "marketing fellow." What could go wrong?
HubSpotters were true believers: They were making the world a better place ... by selling email spam. The office vibe was frat house meets cult compound: The party began at four thirty on Friday and lasted well into the night; "shower pods" became hook-up dens; a push-up club met at noon in the lobby, while nearby, in the "content factory," Nerf gun fights raged. Groups went on "walking meetings," and Dan's absentee boss sent cryptic emails about employees who had "graduated" (read: been fired). In the middle of all this was Dan, exactly twice the age of the average HubSpot employee, and literally old enough to be the father of most of his co-workers, sitting at his desk on his bouncy-ball "chair."
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781478939436 |
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Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
Publication date: | 04/05/2016 |
Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 5.80(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Author's Note vii
Prologue: Welcome to the Content Factory 1
Chapter 1 Beached White Male 11
Chapter 2 When the Ducks Quack 20
Chapter 3 What's a Hub Spot? 30
Chapter 4 The Happy!! Awesome!! Start-Up Cult 39
Chapter 5 HubSpeak 49
Chapter 6 Our Cult Leader Has a Really Awesome Teddy Bear 63
Chapter 7 We Need to Make the Blog a Lot More Dumberer 69
Chapter 8 The Bozo Explosion 77
Chapter 9 In Which I Make a Very Big Mistake 89
Chapter 10 Life in the Boiler Room 96
Chapter 11 OMG the Halloween Party!!! 105
Chapter 12 The New Work: Employees as Widgets 113
Chapter 13 The Ron Burgundy of Tech 128
Chapter 14 Meet the New Boss 138
Chapter 15 Grandpa Buzz 143
Chapter 16 Ritual Humiliation as Rehabilitation 160
Chapter 17 A Disturbance in the Farce 164
Chapter 18 A House of Cards? 172
Chapter 19 Go West, Old Man 177
Chapter 20 Glassholes 183
Chapter 21 Excuse Me, but Would You Please Get the Fuck Out of Our Company? 192
Chapter 22 Inbound and Down 202
Chapter 23 Escape Velocity 220
Chapter 24 If I Only Had a Heart 225
Chapter 25 Graduation Day 234
Epilogue 241
Acknowledgments 259
What People are Saying About This
Using his trademark wit and clear-eyed analysis, Dan Lyons has delivered a much-needed referendum on the current state of Silicon Valley. In wildly entertaining fashion, Disrupted explores the ways in which many technology companies have come to fool the public and themselves. Lyons has injected a dose of sanity into a world gone mad. --Ashlee Vance, New York Times-bestselling author of Elon Musk
Dan Lyons goes deep inside a company that uses terms like "world class marketing thought leaders" to show us how ridiculous, wasteful, and infantile tech start-ups like this can be. And best of all, Lyons does this with his trademark pejorative and hilarious tone. --Nick Bilton, New York Times technology columnist