Name: Nick Gracilla's review of Disrupted by Dan Lyons
Item: Disrupted
Rating: 5
Author: Nick Gracilla

Dan Lyons

Dan Lyons was Technology Editor at Newsweek Magazine for years, a magazine writer at the top of his profession. One Friday morning he received a phone call: his job no longer existed. Fifty years old and with a wife and two young kids, Dan was unemployed and facing financial oblivion. 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 nebulous role of "marketing fellow." What could possibly go wrong? What follows is a hilarious and excoriating account of Dan's time at the start-up and a revealing window onto the dysfunctional culture that prevails in a world flush with cash and devoid of experience. Filled with stories of meaningless jargon, teddy bears at meetings, push-up competitions and all-night parties, this uproarious tale is also a trenchant analysis of the dysfunctional start-up world, a de facto conspiracy between those who start companies and those who fund them. It is a world where bad ideas are rewarded with hefty investments, where companies blow money lavishing perks on their post-collegiate workforces, and where everybody is trying to hang on just long enough to cash out with a fortune.

Ludicrous Misadventures in the Tech Start-up Bubble

Disrupted

Pavlos Nicolaou

For 25 years Dan Lyons was a leading tech journalist--until the Friday his Newsweek boss called. His job? Gone. Fifty years old with two young kids, Lyons was, in a word, screwed. Then an idea hit. For years he'd seen people strike gold in the start-up boom. Why not him? One tech company, flush with $100 million, offered a pile of stock options. What could go wrong? His new employer made the world a better place...by selling email spam. The office vibe was frat house meets cult compound: Shower pods became hook-up dens; Nerf gun fights broke out at lunch; and absent bosses specialized in cryptic, jargon-filled emails. In the middle of this sat Lyons, old enough to be his coworkers' father. With portraits of devilish angel investors, fad-chasing venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and wantrapreneurs, bloggers and brogrammers, DISRUPTED is a hilarious story of self-reinvention and a definitive account of life in the tech bubble.

My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

Nick Gracilla

Reading this as like a glass of iced water after a long desert drive: clear, refreshing, and very needed. A sendup of a certain kind of trendy tech startup, it's alternately funny, bullshit free, and, in the last few chapters, frightening. Billions are at stake, here, in a VC funded alternate reality that's distinctly unwelcoming of outsiders. A must read.

Belle

Fairly easy to read, and made some good points about the broader, worrisome trends growing in the tech world. The actual unveiling of the culture at HubSpot was less interesting than I expected, as I've worked at startups that had milder versions of the same kind of thing going on. If you didn't know what that was like already, I think you'd get more out of the first 1/2 of the book.

Dan Lyons is a witty, funny, and charming writer.  Told from his perspective at a young HubSpot, this is a fresh take on startup culture.

Benjamin Harrison

Anna Pinto

Reads like a horror story for those of us that work in this industry. Entertaining, but the author sometimes really really wants you to feel sympathetic to him, which detracts from the narrative.

Artas Bartas

I knew Dan Lyons from his Fake Steve Jobs blog. I found the blog hilarious and would spend hours on end reading it. Then I also heard that Dan Lyons is one of the scriptwriters behind the Silicon Valley, an HBO series about startups. Again, I found the series hysterically funny and came to view Dan Lyons as a really funny author. So when the news of the new book by him broke out, I pre-ordered a copy without as much as reading a single review. 

It turns out that the real Dan Lyons is a very different person from the imaginary character I pictured in my mind. As I found out from reading the book, he is old (56 y.o. at the moment of writing this). He is opportunistic. He has a strong sense of entitlement. He is not very good at reading people. And above all, he hates startups. All these qualities do not make Dan Lyons a bad person per se. But they cloud his judgment in a way that renders his account of the startup world skewed and superficial. 

As someone who's been working in startups for more than ten years, I find Dan Lyons' perspective deeply flawed. Throughout his book, he operates on the assumption that VCs are greedy and stupid, company founders are ruthless and dishonest, and startup employees are clueless and scheming. Or to quote directly: "Walking around San Francisco, it strikes me that [the surge in startup funding] cannot end well, that the combination of magical thinking, easy money, greedy investors, and amoral founders represents a recipe for disaster." 

As if that was not enough, the author also brings a lot of personal baggage to the story. He is painfully self-conscious of his age and inept at developing professional relations. The book is peppered with observations of the type: "Here I am, a guy in my fifties, with lots of gray hair and experience, and I'm being treated like shit by twenty-something people at Halligan's company." As you will see from reading the book, Dan Lyons is indeed treated like shit, but the true cause of such treatment is not his age, but the circumstances of his hiring and culture clash.

Which brings us the subject of the book - a Boston-based startup called Hubspot. Hubspot produces marketing automation software for small and medium businesses. In many ways, Hubspot is a typical startup: it tries to create distinct office culture, adopts quirky management techniques, and has employees conversing in a startup lingo ("Spinner has a GSD attitude and is a total team player"). But there are certain things that also make the company stand out and not necessarily in a good way. 

There is a story of Molly, a teddy bear that sits at the table during the product team's meetings as a stand in for the customer. There is Fearless Friday, an internal hackathon designed to tackle high-risk projects, that degenerates into amateur painting classes. There is a culture of work insecurity, where anyone can be fired on the spot, with no severance pay. The practice that is made all the more jarring by the fact that the company describes such events as "graduation." And then there is a case of Hubspot values, referred throughout the company by their acronym - HEART (humble, effective, adaptable, remarkable, and transparent). As the book shows, there is a major disconnect between these values and reality, which breeds a lot of cynicism.

On one occasion, Dan Lyon goes as far as to liken the company culture at Hubspot to a Scientology cult. This well might be true. I also would be the first person to high-five Lyon for exposing the cult behavior and having a laugh at the expense of the cult leaders. But once you become aware of the biases shaping Dan Lyon's perspective, it is hard to take the narrative of the book at face value. At the very best, it is a caricature of the startup world. And not a particularly observant one either. At the end of the day, it's hard to say how much of the bumbling behavior going on at Hubspot actually happened and how much was misconstrued by the author. 

And this is why I find "Disrupted" humor hollow and the book itself flawed.

Jacob Cockcroft

Daniel Poulsen

Niels Andersen

John Nettles

Ethan Lee-Tyson

Aaron

Kahli Scott

Jeffrey Mack

Timur Literal

Rosie Yakob 

Bouke van der Bijl

Kevin

Tomek Skupiński

Luis Redondo Cañada 

Sang Park

Andy Sporring

An instant New York Times bestseller, Dan Lyons' "hysterical" (Recode) memoir, hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "the best book about Silicon Valley," takes readers inside the maddening world of fad-chasing venture capitalists, sales bros, social climbers, and sociopaths at today's tech startups. For twenty-five 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 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."

Pavlos Nicolaou &
Disrupted by Dan Lyons

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Pavlos Nicolaou &Disrupted by Dan Lyons

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Pavlos Nicolaou &
Disrupted by Dan Lyons