Disrupted: Ludicrous Misadventures in the Tech Start-Up Bubble By Dan Lyons Hachette, US ISBN: 978-0316306089 272pp.

Dan Lyons’ book Disrupted: Ludicrous Misadventures in the Tech Start-Up Bubble, as the name suggests, is an entertaining first-person account of the madness of the tech revolution. It tells of the journey of a 52-year old, smart-alecky but grumpy journalist who once had a distinguished career as technology editor at Newsweek before being laid off. He joins Boston start-up HubSpot as a marketing fellow and attempts to acclimatise to this work-life transition. Though several books on the subject have been published before, such as Michael Wolff’s Burn Rate and The Leap by Tom Ashbrook, what makes Disrupted stand out is Lyons’ extreme sarcasm about the company he’s joined, from the moment he walks in the door.

Before reading the book I did a quick Google search and was pleasantly surprised to see that Lyons is the same person who created the popular parody blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. He has also written for the very funny HBO television series Silicon Valley. That itself was a great start. Being in the business of marketing and publishing myself, I was particularly interested in Lyons’ journey as I was also looking for a career change in a similar direction. My initial impression was that the book was going to be funny, and while it was entertaining, I found it to be vivid, cynical, but quite disturbing as well.

Once a privileged technology journalist, Lyons is — as he puts it — “unceremoniously dumped” from Newsweek because of the recession in the print media industry. At the time, his wife is unemployed and he has two young children. He needs a quick fix and HubSpot promises him a new professional challenge, decent remuneration, and a likely IPO. He decides to try his luck, assuming he already knows a lot about the industry. As he later finds out, it’s one thing to be writing about tech companies, and totally another to be working for one.

Being part of a start-up is the ambition of most milllenials, but is the dream as wonderful as they think?

The first few chapters reminded me of the film, The Intern. But unlike the graceful Robert De Niro, Lyons’ constant complaining dispels the notion quickly. The author seems a man with a grudge, who has a strong personal opinion about something that he wants the readers to agree with. Throughout, he comes across as someone in the wrong place, hating not being a privileged journalist anymore.

HubSpot hires Lyons to chronicle the company’s accomplishments leading up to its IPO, but what the company’s founders — Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah — don’t realise is that Lyons is going to showcase everything: the good, the bad, and the ugly. In the end, HubSpot goes public, trading at around $50 a share (double its initial price of $25 per share). The saying ‘all publicity is good publicity’ certainly seems to be correct here, but this book is no love letter to HubSpot. It skewers the company and its culture which, according to Lyons, resembles a hell-house — one gem that Lyons details is the executives’ use of the term “graduated” when someone is fired or quits. The company also lacks diversity, a problem prevalent throughout the tech industry. There is rampant ageism; Lyons is one of only two employees over the age of 50 and is often the butt of jokes. In addition, HubSpot tends to treat its staff as throwaway widgets. Women bear the worst of it; those over the age of 35, or those with children, are pushed out. This exposé of the new workforce is upsetting — it is a place where beer-keg Fridays, candy walls, and endless snacks take the place of higher pay and other real benefits such as paid maternity leave and pensions.

Lyons provides an eloquent depiction of the tech start-up cultural bubble, from how these companies devalue labour through racism, ageism, and sexism, to how the funding and breakup of their IPO model works, tremendously benefiting the people at the top of the food chain. The book is a good reminder that many start-ups in Silicon Valley are more propaganda than reality. HubSpot, in this case, is projected as a hellish place to work with an inferior product and a polluted culture, yet still manages to be aspirational to many businesses. The manner in which these start-ups pay lip service to making work fun, changing the world, and giving value to people’s lives is a crock. Its stance of exploiting value for investors and founders while making the workforce literally throwaways is terrifying. To quote the book itself: “This is the New Work, but really it is just a new twist on an old story, the one about labour being exploited by capital. The difference is that this time the exploitation is done with a big smiley face. Everything about this new workplace, from the crazy décor to the change-the-world rhetoric to the hero’s journey mythology and the perks that are not really perks — all of these things exist for one reason, which is to drive down the cost of labour so that investors can maximise their return.” 

A lot of these new start-up founders are somewhat unsavoury people. [...] Apple CEO Steve Jobs used to talk about a phenomenon called a “bozo explosion,” by which a company’s mediocre early hires rise up through the ranks and end up running departments. The bozos now must hire other people, and of course, they prefer to hire bozos.— Excerpt from the book

The bottom line of this story is a culture clash. HubSpot is about moving at high-speed, a go-get-it way of life that, as Lyons tells it, values passion and “teamwork” over competence, strategy, or profit. The author is a veteran journalist whom the rest of the workers just can’t seem to figure out. He’s got a wife and kids while they’re hard-charging “bros” and young women who all seem to wear the same clothes and have the same haircut. The senior managers who hired him don’t have time to manage him; somebody much younger ends up as his boss. They don’t know what to do with him; he’s more qualified and experienced for anything they throw at him. He only hangs on to the work for the paycheck and health benefits.

Lyons’ observations of the misunderstandings, character conflicts, social media faux pas, and HubSpot’s cult of belief make the story come alive. He holds nothing back in this narrative of his co-workers and, most importantly, his own feelings and emotions as he goes through the ordeal. The conclusion is most interesting because it tells of how some HubSpot executives found themselves part of an FBI investigation for trying to illegally get a copy of this book, so fretful were they about what was in it, and were thus fired from their jobs.

On the whole, the book is a witty, worthwhile, though sometimes painfully cringe-worthy read. The company HubSpot is particularly despicable, but I found many of the themes to be true of the tech industry generally. For those interested in the tech world, or marketing, or start-ups, this book is an eye-opener. And while there are times when Lyons disappoints by engaging in self-importance and even being vindictive, overall, I tend to agree with his criticisms.

The reviewer is a marketer, writer, and publisher

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 26th, 2017