For 25 years Dan Lyons was a magazine writer at the top of his profession – until 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 4:30 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 coworkers, sitting at his desk on his bouncy-ball “chair”.
Mixed in with Lyons’ uproarious tale of his rise and fall at HubSpot is a trenchant analysis of the start-up world, a de facto conspiracy between those who start companies and those who fund them, a world where bad ideas are rewarded with hefty investments, where companies blow money lavishing perks on their postcollegiate workforces, and where everybody is trying to hang on just long enough to reach an IPO and cash out.
With a cast of characters that includes devilish angel investors, fad-chasing venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and “wantrapreneurs”, bloggers and brogrammers, social climbers and sociopaths, Disrupted is a gripping and definitive account of life in the (second) tech bubble.
OMG…..I’ve experienced some of this! I LOVED this book! Read it in two nights. This really hit home for me because I’m in sort of a similar situation (but not as extreme). I’m 62, in the IT industry, and most of my co-workers are late 20’s-early 30’s. There are laugh-out-loud sections of this book, that I have personally experienced. While my situation is somewhat different, the culture shock of working with “kids” as I call them (and that’s probably ageist in itself) can be both shocking and entertaining at the same…
This is exactly like the start up i most recently worked for This is the funniest book I’ve read in years. Anyone who works (or has worked) at a start-up and who understands the forced corporate culture should read this. This is exactly like the start up i most recently worked for, even down to the names and titles. I was literally spitting out my tea at my desk while I laughed. Ever had to take a personality test and then get stuck in a room talking about it for 1/2 day while your work piles up? Dan talks about it and summarizes it perfectly.
Wildly entertaining AND important Disrupted not only wildly entertains; it also sheds light on some troubling issues in the startup and tech cultures.Â