My favorite books are imperfect, but challenge me to reconsider my perceptions and beliefs. Disrupted did that for me.
The Good:
There hasn’t been a major book documenting the dark side of the SaaS tech industry. I’ve seen more than a few books ripping apart Wall Street culture, Private Equity, Hedge Funds, and corporations like McDonalds and Wal-Mart. And while there have been critiques on Apple or Microsoft, this is the first takedown of note on the Silicon Valley scene. The author makes Hubspot — a SaaS Small to Meduim Business Martketing Automation firm — seem like the epitome of the industry.
I thank the author for pointing out the lack of people diversity in these types companies. It’s not just race. It is age and socioeconomic background. There are few women in positions of power. It’s also valuable to point out the poor management and personal issues that many founders have had. It’s a service to warn people about the short-termism and the ageism. Everyone in the technology industry should read this book.
I appreciate his critique that firms like Hubspot and Salesforce are Sales driven organization as opposed to engineering driven organization. There is a lot of hype and less ground breaking functionality with these firms.
I also give the author a lot credit for his storytelling and writing. I was a bit predisposed to rip this book apart. Sometimes takedown or expose books get too passionate about their argument. It’s a fun read of dysfunctional work place. You can simply take the book as that and move on, but I didn’t.
One story telling example, he contrasting the two founders and their metrics HEART (Humble Effective Adaptable Remarkable Transparent) vs. VORP (Value Over Replacement Player). This was well done. It’s a service to remind us that under that huggy-feely, teddy-bear carrying HEART sentimentality there is a cut-throat, make your number or you’re fired VORP mentality — free beer and candy be damned.
There’s a lot of good here. There are genuinely laugh out loud moments and vivid conflict. The author is somewhat able to tie the woes of Hubspot to the larger issues in the tech industry or Silicon Valley today. The “Glassholes” chapter attempted to drive that home. However, even here, the author is mostly drawing from personal experience as editor of the Fake Steve Jobs and Valleywag blogs.
Which brings us to the bad.
The Bad
First and foremost – the nonstop complaining that Hubspot doesn’t make a profit. Stop it.
The rules of the game that Hubspot is playing do not require it to make a profit. Who says they need to? It’s the authors “Business 101” perception that all companies should be profitable despite that intellectually he knows that companies like Hubspot do not have to be profitable – and that’s been the case for the last 20 years. It’s like still complaining that Al Gore won the general election, but lost the Electoral College because of a hanging chad.
That leads to the second bad – his depiction that Hubspot is a house of cards. They need to IPO or go broke, he writes. That may have been the feeling 3 months before IPO; however, Hubspot consistently raised money. They didn’t raise $100 Million over night and then blow it in 6 years. Here’s the data: [...] . Hubspot has cash-paying customers, who renew their subscription 88% of the time. They are a not Ponzi scheme or a credit default swap trading desk.
The third bad – once Hubspot IPO’s it will tank. After going public 18 months ago, HUBS is up 40% compared to the S&P 500 up 7% and its closest competitor Marketo is down 10%. So much for profitability.
Moving away from the bad business critiques – the author repeats himself. Same rants about ageism and lack of diversity. Same jabs at the stupidity of co-workers – the lax bros, New England college girls going on a date, middle-America Mary. Over and over.
Further he doesn’t go deep on research. The information above about the funding numbers reveals that. He’s basically just writing from his own experience, which is good; however, when tries to tie that experience to the bigger industry wide issues, it lacks some creditably. The business issues further limit his credibility to just his ability to write entertainingly about his own experience.
His own experience was brutal, but he didn’t help things.
The Ugly
The author self-sabotages.
Three social media mistakes:
1) Don’t post negative comments about the CEO on Facebook, especially when you have a public following and the CEO just wrapped up his first major news interview.
2) Don’t Unfriend or Unfollow your boss, especially when your boss may be crazy and sadistic.
3) Don’t make inside jokes about your co-workers where those coworkers can also see those jokes. He made a veiled little dig at coworker, the coworker saw it, understood it, and then flipped out.
Generally, the author is condescending towards everyone he works with. The whole industry is beneath him. That came through in his personal interactions. His colleagues didn’t like him; not just because he wasn’t like them, but because of his acerbic humor and air of superiority.
His final self-sabotage: he put in his 6 weeks’ notice of resignation the day after a truly brutal and psychologically abusive annual review. This was revenge. Hubspot, themselves vindictive, responded by firing him, immediately. He managed to get a better deal, but he should have just waited a month and given the standard 2 weeks. He put his family at risk of being uninsured and lost salary.
I don’t mean to be too harsh. I probably would have done the same. It’s a testament to self-control that he stayed at Hubspot for 20 months without doing anything worse than petty passive aggressive outbursts,
My Advice:
Read this book today! It’s is an eye-opener. Take his business insights with a grain of salt. Then read the response from Hubspot. It has 1000s of likes on LinkedIn – not surprising if you’ve read his book. That response is exactly the type of thing the author does a great job of fleshing out – part Orwellian, part corporate gobbledygook, part well-intentioned but aloof.
If you are looking for a salacious or raunchy read, you won’t get much here. There’s nothing in the book itself that would kill the company or put people in jail. While damaged, Hubspot has responded and recovered. There was an incident last summer where three major characters in the book tried illegally to obtain a copy of the manuscript. It was investigated by the FBI. This only adds to the drama of the public real-life playout of the book.
It’s a quick read and almost required if you work in the industry.
As Mary would say, it's totes magotes with awesomesauce!!!
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Thanks, Dan Lyons. Now Anyone Over 40 Really IS Unemployable in High-Tech
Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2016
Thanks, Dan Lyons. Now Anyone Over 40 Really IS Unemployable in Hhigh-TechI have to admit that when I read a while ago that Dan Lyons had been hired by HubSpot, I was gob smacked. I mean, Dan Lyons, former technology editor for Newsweek, which itself was started at the same time Moses was publishing the Ten Commandments, is old. How old? He’s over 50. Do you know old 50+ plus is in high-tech?Those dinosaur fossils at the natural history museums? Infants compared to Dan. The therapsids? Children. Diploceraspis? (They look exactly like they sound). Teenagers. The only prehistoric life contemporaneous with Dan is maybe the Archaea, Latin for “Live Goo in a Jar.” When he showed up at HubSpot for his first day of work, he didn’t need at a spot at an open desk. A warm petri dish would have done just fine.You have to give HubSpot a great deal of credit for hiring Dan. I mean, if a triceratops showed up for a job interview at your shiny startup, would you hire it? I don’t think so. Now, maybe you should hire that dinosaur. This giant reptile might be the hottest Ruby on Rails coder out there and can even prove it! But then then you look down at its resume and spot that once upon a time, it wrote a program in UCSD Pascal. A little red flag goes up and after asking the requisite number of questions to avoid the appearance of violating U.S. job discrimination laws, you smile brightly at the ceratopsid in front of you, help direct its 12 ton body out of your office and building, and promptly consign the resume to the virtual circular file.But this didn’t happen at HubSpot. They hired Dan at a decent salary and gave him a pre IPO stock package that came in at around $60K. (HubSpot went public in 2014 at $25 per share and now trades between $40 to $45, a tidy return on an initial investment.) When he showed up for his first day of work, we find out that the company offers its employees, among other things, free food, free beer, exercise rooms, unlimited vacations and fully paid for Blue Cross health insurance.(There’s a word some people use for a workplace providing the aforementioned perks.That word is “Heaven.”)Alas, things didn’t work out between HubSpot and Dan and for its troubles, the company ended up with a big sharp PR horn shoved up its fundament, its marketing chief was fired for apparently trying to filch an unreleased manuscript of the book, Dan’s boss was fired, and HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan received a stern dressing down from the company’s board and was made to go stand in a corner. Oh, and the FBI is criminally investigating the whole mess. (I really think the Bureau has better things to do with its time.)Somehow, it just doesn’t seem fair. To HubSpot.I’ve read Disrupted and believe any fair observer will conclude the company was royally trolled. Dan gives the game away in the first chapter of the book. In this section,the things he learns include:* He will be working with and under people younger than himself. Dan believes this is beneath Dan.* He dislikes the color orange and the HubSpot logo, which he thinks resembles a penis. It doesn’t, but Dan has a point to make.* He doesn’t like the fact that HubSpot sells a package of inbound marketing services aimed at small and medium sized businesses so they can sell, as he puts it, “more stuff.” One wonders why Dan accepted a job at the company, as HubSpot makes no attempt to hide its business model.* He’s upset the company founders don’t meet him in person to conduct his first-day orientation. I didn’t feel bad for Dan when I read this. My first day of work at the first company I worked for, sometime during the early Carboniferous, the guy who hired me had already been fired. This is high-tech, Big Guy.* That when you put a group of hormonally charged 20 and 30 somethings working at a high-pressure startup in close proximity to one another, they will want to have sex. And do so. Sometimes at work. This, of course, never happened in a place such as Newsweek.* Sales people in high-tech companies like to have wild parties.* HubSpot has a telemarketing arm that makes lots of phone calls, the reps read from scripts, and their performance is measured. This is the journalistic equivalent of reporting that humans breathe air.* HubSpot doesn’t use cube farms, but prefers to arrange its offices in “open desk” configurations. Not even upper management is allocated offices.* Employees are allowed to bring their dogs to work.* HubSpot is not profitable.* HubSpot has an internal corporate culture it promotes to its employees.Upon reading this, my first reaction was “Dan, you were the chief technology guy for Newsweek, wrote about the industry for Forbes, and are part of the writing staff for the TV show Silicon Valley for chrissakes. What was your beat all that time? IBM mainframe marketing?Let’s take ageism first. Perhaps Dan only discovered this phenomenon when he first went to work for HubSpot, but some of us have known about the situation for a long time. Take this excerpt from my book, In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters. I wrote this in 2006 for the second edition, back when I was a therapsid:"High tech is awash with barely disguised age discrimination. High tech companies vigorously deny this because U.S. law forbids age discrimination; the companies, of course, are lying. In most cases, if you decide to make a career in high technology, you will be fawned over whilst in your 20s and respected until your late 30s. At age 40+, if you have not escaped into upper management, it is assumed you will be either a) rich from the money you made working for a hot start-up or b) preparing for a second career, perhaps as a fries preparation specialist at the food court of your local mall. At 50+ a perk of your job will include a shiny new shovel, with which you are expected to dig your own grave, jump in, and then drag the dirt over on top of you. If you are 60+ and are spotted in the halls of a high-technology company, it is assumed you are either a) the grandparent of an employee or b) a ghost."I suspect Dan is having some fun with us with the age stuff. It would have taken him about five minutes on Google to discover the average age of the people he’d be working with at HubSpot. But perhaps Dan is too old to use the Internet? In that case, he could have simply visited HubSpot HQ and taken a look around.Rest of post up at:[...]
Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2016
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