Silicon Valley I: Disrupted
Lyons, Daniel. Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-up Bubble. Hachette Books, 2016.
Dan Lyons, once the anonymous author of the acerbic Fake Steve Jobs blog (2006-11) and now a writer on HBO’s Silicon Valley satire, hit a rough patch in 2013. At 51 years old, he was suddenly downsized from his prestigious job as technology editor at Newsweek and decided to reinvent himself as a marketing professional at a startup. His road to success is full of potholes and is the subject of his new book, Disrupted.
After sifting through a handful of opportunities, Lyons takes a job at a Boston startup, HubSpot, a cloud computing company, selling marketing automation software for businesses. He accepts a lower salary but bets that his stock options will be worth money in a few years. As Lyons settles into HubSpot, he finds the company and work culture mystifying. Most of HubSpot’s 500 employees are in their 20s and relentlessly positive. The culture is energetic, enthusiastic and loyal, but managers are poorly trained and oversight is haphazard. Lyons’ cynicism about free candy, foosball tables and Fearless Fridays is a misfit.
Lyons describes HubSpot’s product as substandard and the leadership as a band of sales and marketing charlatans. The two owners and a handful of investors are focused on growing sales and revenue and telling a heartfelt story about changing the world, while they stay in business long enough to get rich in an IPO, and then move on. HubSpot is no anomaly – Lyons concludes that the new tech industry is run by young amoral hustlers. In the epilogue, he explains that as he delivered the first draft of his book to the publisher, HubSpot executives hacked into his computer and broke into his house to steal his manuscript.
In the end, Lyons argues that in the tech industry, the social agreement that once existed between a company and its workers is gone. Employees are disposable parts that play a role for a few years and then are replaced by someone cheaper just out of college. Silicon Valley is leading the way, but as other industries are reshaped by technology, such as banking and media, they are also changing the way they treat workers. This book is recommended for anyone interested in working or investing in the technology industry.
Also available as an audiobook on CD.
© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.