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Fletcher Agency
Melissa Chinchillo |
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DISRUPTED
My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
A bitingly funny memoir in the spirit of Liar's Poker and How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, about working at a software startup during the second tech bubble, a time when a relatively small group of people managed to generate more wealth than has ever been created in one place at one time in all of human history.
An editor of Valley Wag and staff writer on HBO's acclaimed Silicon Valley, Dan Lyons was a tech journalist for 25 years. One Friday morning he got a call, telling him that his job no longer existed. “I think they just want to hire younger people,” she said. “They can take your salary and hire five kids right out of college.”
Aged 52, Dan lands a job at HubSpot, a hot software startup based in Boston, that had recently raised $100 million from some of the best firms in Silicon Valley. They offered him a job with a lower salary but with a pile of stock options. Hired to elevate the company's profile and create a blog that would put HubSpot in the realm of "thought leaders," Dan rationalized it was the same job he’d always done. The problem was, that wasn't the job they actually gave him.
HubSpotters, as they called themselves, had come to believe that they were making the world a better place. Yes, but surely people didn’t actually believe that, did they? Especially when your product was selling email spam. But they had content hackathons, a pushup club and Nerf gun fights. Then there was Dan: the grumpy old bastard sitting on his bouncy ball with noise-canceling headphones on, in the middle of the "content factory," wondering how life had come to this.
Dan Lyons is a writer on the HBO comedy series Silicon Valley and was the technology editor at Newsweek, a columnist at Forbes, and editor-in-chief of ReadWrite. He also created a popular anonymous blog called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (Fake Steve Jobs) that was the basis for the novel OPTION$ and a television show that Dan collaborated on.
Aged 52, Dan lands a job at HubSpot, a hot software startup based in Boston, that had recently raised $100 million from some of the best firms in Silicon Valley. They offered him a job with a lower salary but with a pile of stock options. Hired to elevate the company's profile and create a blog that would put HubSpot in the realm of "thought leaders," Dan rationalized it was the same job he’d always done. The problem was, that wasn't the job they actually gave him.
HubSpotters, as they called themselves, had come to believe that they were making the world a better place. Yes, but surely people didn’t actually believe that, did they? Especially when your product was selling email spam. But they had content hackathons, a pushup club and Nerf gun fights. Then there was Dan: the grumpy old bastard sitting on his bouncy ball with noise-canceling headphones on, in the middle of the "content factory," wondering how life had come to this.
Dan Lyons is a writer on the HBO comedy series Silicon Valley and was the technology editor at Newsweek, a columnist at Forbes, and editor-in-chief of ReadWrite. He also created a popular anonymous blog called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (Fake Steve Jobs) that was the basis for the novel OPTION$ and a television show that Dan collaborated on.
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Book
Published 2016-04-05 by Hachette Books |