Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

by Dan Lyons

HubSpot’s leaders were not heroes, but rather a pack of sales and marketing charlatans who spun a good story about magical transformational technology and got rich by selling shares in a company that still has never turned a profit.

But when I arrive at HubSpot’s reception desk, something weird happens: Nobody is expecting me. The receptionist, Penny, who could pass for a high school student, has no idea who I am or why I’m here. She frowns and looks me up on her computer: nothing. This seems odd.

Most are in their twenties. Attire for the guys skews toward bro-wear—shorts and flip-flops, untucked button-down oxford shirts, backward-facing baseball caps—while the women cultivate a look that a friend of mine calls “New England college girl going on a date,” meaning jeans, boots, sweaters.

Everyone works in vast, open spaces, crammed next to one another like seamstresses in Bangladeshi shirt factories, only instead of being hunched over sewing machines they are hunched over laptops.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, a little voice inside my head keeps saying as I follow Zack and his gelled hair down the hall, my pulse thrumming in my temples. Nine months ago I was the technology editor of Newsweek. In that job I did not even notice people like Zack, or Wingman, or even Cranium. They are the kind of people whose calls I would not return, whose emails I deleted without opening.

sit shoulder to shoulder with twenty other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult. It’s amazing, and hilarious. It’s everything I ever imagined might take place inside a tech company, only even better.

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.

HubSpot’s CMS is a tinker toy compared to WordPress, the most popular blogging software, which also costs nothing to use.

For example, we’re told that our email campaigns do not involve badgering people, or pestering them—rather, we’re “nurturing” them. “Lead nurturing” is a big thing in the world of online marketing. If

To me this seems like complete bullshit. Of course we’re creating spam. What else can you call it when you blast out email messages to millions of people? For

HubSpot seems to recruit a certain kind of person: young and easily influenced, kids who belonged to sororities and fraternities or played sports in college. Many are working in their first jobs. As far as I can tell there are no black people, not just among my recruiting class, but across the entire company. The HubSpotters are not just white but a certain kind of white: middle-class, suburban, mostly from the Boston area. They look the same, dress the same. The uniformity is amazing.

HubSpot is like a corporate version of Up with People, the inspirational singing group from the 1970s, but with a touch of Scientology.

The whole world of online sales and marketing is filled with people who listen to Tony Robbins audiobooks on their way to work and dream of unleashing the power within themselves, people who love schmaltzy, smarmy motivational-speaker guff about being passionate, following your dreams, and conquering fear.

Reporters are trained to hate corporate jargon and to eliminate it, not to engage in it. We’re expected to be cynical and skeptical, not to be cheerleaders.

Mark Zuckerberg was twenty when he founded Facebook, and once famously said, “Young people are just smarter.”

If you put a room full of journalists into this situation they would immediately begin ripping on each other, taking the piss out of the instructors, asking intentionally stupid questions.

The lazy tweets make life easier for us, but having a bunch of people from HubSpot suddenly flood Twitter with exactly the same messages at exactly the same time doesn’t strike me as the smartest way to promote an article. On the Internet, ginning up fake grassroots support is called astroturfing, and the tactic is generally frowned upon. I’m surprised to see HubSpot doing it, because the company touts its expertise at social media marketing and claims it can teach small business owners how to attract attention online by creating unique, “lovable” content and being “remarkable.” But here we are, bludgeoning social media with a barrage of identical tweets, all telling everyone we know to go read this great new article by our boss.

At Newsweek I worked for Jon Meacham, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson. Here I work for a guy who brings a teddy bear to work and considers it a management innovation.

ALL CAPS about some half-formed idea that he believes will enable us to “conquer the world” and “blow up the Internet.” People at HubSpot love that phrase about blowing up the Internet. They use it all the time.

Shrinks call this the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after two researchers from Cornell University whose studies found that incompetent people fail to recognize their own lack of skill, grossly overestimate their abilities, and are unable to recognize talent in other people who actually are competent.

One of his ploys to get attention involves publishing an article on Mashable, a technology news site, with the provocative headline 10 REASONS WHY I IGNORED YOUR RESUME. In the article Cranium makes fun of the awful resumes he fields in his position as a world-famous marketing superstar. Cranium

But we use our software. Our business is built on top of our software. We “eat our own dog food,” as they say in the tech industry—or, as Cranium likes to put it, “We drink our own Champagne.”

They’re dressed up like Smurfs and witches, sexy pirates, sexy Snow Whites, naughty devils, characters from Harry Potter. They’re all trying really hard to show everyone how much fun they are having at this totally rad company with all these totally cool people. But it’s not cool. It’s sad. And weird.

HubSpot started out as a sales operation in search of a product.

“You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises start-ups. “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.”

How can you get hundreds of people to work in sales and marketing for the lowest possible wages? One way is to hire people who are right out of college and make work seem fun. You give them free beer and foosball tables. You decorate the place like a cross between a kindergarten and a frat house. You throw parties. Do that, and you can find an endless supply of bros who will toil away in the spider monkey room, under constant, tremendous psychological pressure, for $35,000 a year. You can save even more money by packing these people into cavernous rooms, shoulder to shoulder, as densely as you can. You tell them that you’re doing this not because you want to save money on office space but because this is how their generation likes to work.

It’s a world where older workers are not wanted, where people get tossed aside when they turn forty.

poorly trained (or completely untrained) managers abuse employees and fire people with impunity,

There was a time, not so long ago, when companies felt obliged to look after their employees and to be good corporate citizens.

In the New Work, employers may expect loyalty from workers but owe no loyalty to them in return.

“You know,” I say, “you guys are the first generation that’s willing to work for free candy. My generation would never have fallen for that. We wanted to get paid in actual money.”

This is the New Work, but really it is just a new twist on an old story, the one about labor 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 labor so that investors can maximize their return.

But in 1995 things went nuts. The average CEO was making 122 times as much as the average worker. By 2000, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio reached 383, according to EPI. The ratio now stands at about 300.

These are the people who claim they are making the world a better place. And they are. For themselves.

They also won’t acknowledge that my little sub-blog has been generating a lot of traffic. In terms of page views, the five biggest posts over the past ninety days have been from me. One of my articles generated 190,000 views in a single day.

Halligan explains that young people make better employees, especially in the technology industry, where everything is changing so fast that older people just can’t keep up. Then comes the money quote: “In the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated.” Only an imbecile would say this.

Halligan is essentially admitting that Hubspot discriminates on the basis of age. Age discrimination has become a huge issue in Silicon Valley. Halligan is not the only tech CEO who prefers to hire young people; he’s just the only one dumb enough to admit it.

“In the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated,” says THE CEO OF THE COMPANY WHERE I FUCKING WORK. “We’re trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y’ers.” I feel so special.

Officially nobody ever gets fired because of age. Officially, their position no longer exists, or the department is changing priorities. But everyone knows the truth. They’re old, and they get paid too much.

“They can take your salary and hire five kids right out of college.”

Halligan has made a classic Kinsley gaffe, named after the journalist Michael Kinsley, who defined gaffes as those moments when politicians slip up and reveal what they truly believe: “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.”

So that’s the good news—they can’t fire me. The bad news is that they can do what companies often do when there’s someone they want to get rid of—which is they can abuse me and make my life a living hell, so that I’ll leave on my own.

The biggest effect of being older than everyone else is simply that it keeps me from being able to fit in. At tech companies like HubSpot, fitting in is not just something that’s nice to do—it’s essential to your success. It is perhaps the most important thing.

“Young people are just smarter,” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg once said, when he was twenty-two years old.

“Making the movie” is the term that a venture capitalist friend applies to the process of building a start-up. In my friend’s tech-company-as-movie analogy, the VCs are the producers and the CEO is the leading man.

Our friendship really matters to me, I tell her. She nods as I speak, and says, “Agreed. Totally. Absolutely. Likewise. Absolutely. Totally,” in her vocal fry voice.

I can’t believe this. The gig feels like a gift from the gods, or maybe a cruel practical joke that one of my friends is playing on me. I feel like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life—I was just about to jump when an angel appeared. Ryan, my new agent, is that angel. He’s my Clarence. God bless you, Ryan. I talk to Alec Berg. We hit it off. The show gets renewed. Ryan negotiates my deal.

I told her this because Cranium was tossing around the idea of having HubSpot make a documentary film, something along the lines of The Naked Brand. I asked if I could be involved with the project, since (a) I’m friends with the guy who made The Naked Brand and could ask him for advice and guidance, and (b) I have some experience working in TV. No one was interested.

One big difference between this and HubSpot is that I’m back in the world of grown-ups.

Here, you are allowed to tell dirty jokes and to be a cynical, sarcastic prick. In fact, it’s encouraged.