Review of Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

Book Link: Amazon (smile)

Working in tech and at start-ups while starting to feel old recently, this felt like a easy lay-up for a book I would like. It didn't disappoint! Some of this comes off as a person venting about a former employer and some of the terrible stuff that happens at pretty much every job. Dan Lyons is a great writer and it's clear why he was brought in to write for Silicon Valley and how he influenced the story lines. The start-upy stuff is interesting but I found myself more capitvated by the interpersonal relationships of his co-workers and bosses. I also appreciated the focus on how ridiculous venture capital is in the tech industry and how the company values are all made up and the points don't matter. This was a fun and quick read if nothing else than for the schadenfreude, pettiness, and zingers.

Some highlights/thoughts from my reading:

  1. “There’s an old expression on Wall Street,” Tad tells me. “‘When the ducks quack, feed them.’ Have you heard that? Back in the nineties investors wanted to buy anything with the word dotcom at the end of its name. So that’s what we gave them. Our job isn’t to talk people out of buying. Our job is to make what people want. Our job is to feed the ducks. And right now, the ducks are hungry.”
  2. The truth is that we’re selling software that lets companies, most of them small businesses, sell more stuff. The world of online marketing, where HubSpot operates, has a reputation for being kind of grubby. In addition to pool installers and flower shops, our customers include people who make a living bombarding people with email offers, or gaming Google’s search algorithm, or figuring out which kind of misleading subject line is most likely to trick someone into opening a message. Online marketing is not quite as sleazy as Internet porn, but it’s not much better, either.
  3. In training we’re taught that the billions of emails that we blast into the world do not constitute email spam. Instead, those emails are what we call “lovable marketing content.” That is really what our trainers call it. That is the exact term they use.
  4. Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality.
  5. What is the difference between a loyal employee and a brainwashed cultist?
  6. One thing I’ve started to figure out is that the top guys, like Halligan, might really want to change things, but below them there are middle managers like Cranium and Wingman, and entrenched veterans like Marcia and Jan, and these people want nothing to do with newcomers and new ideas. They don’t want change. They like things the way things are. After all, they’re the ones who made things that way. Some of them have been here since the very early days. In their mind, HubSpot belongs to them, not to these interlopers and outsiders who are now storming into the place and writing memos and telling everybody how they should be doing their jobs. Many of these people have never worked anywhere else. A lot of them aren’t very good. But here, they’re in charge. And I’m stuck working under them.
  7. The happy!! awesome!! rhetoric masks the fact that beneath the covers, there is chaos.
  8. He suggests I should forget about trying to become a marketer, but stay at HubSpot anyway. “Think of yourself as an anthropologist,” he says. “Like you’ve been dropped into some strange culture, and you’re studying their rituals. You could maybe write about it. It might be interesting.”
  9. “It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.”
  10. The funds investing in late-stage start-ups and paying ridiculous valuations are demanding, and receiving, a kind of guarantee called a ratchet. That is a promise that if the company goes public at a valuation lower than what the private investors have paid, the company will grant them enough extra shares to make them whole. Some investors are guaranteed to make at least 20 percent on their investment. Unless there’s an apocalyptic meltdown, the investors cannot lose money on these deals. They are taking pretty much no risk.
  11. Wingman isn’t a simpleton, but he’s not overly burdened with intelligence, either. He was in the right place at the right time. Now he is a vice president at a company that soon will be publicly traded, and for what? Just for being there.
  12. “It’s like you’ve given them a dowsing rod, they’ve found a well, the town is saved. It’s magic.”
  13. One thing I noticed during that day at Google was that none of our hosts—a bunch of executives from Google’s mobile phone division—wore Glass. That’s when I knew the gizmo was doomed.
  14. “Even turkeys can fly in a strong wind.”
  15. Pump money into sales and marketing, generate enough hype, and you can sell almost anything if the market gets frothy enough.
  16. To my amazement, Trotsky admits that he has been hounding me. He even explains why he’s doing it. He says it’s because I unfriended him on Facebook, back in August. He knows it’s silly, but he felt insulted by this.