Dan Lyons - Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

Ive spent the past decade writing satire about the technology industryfirst on a blog, then in a novel, and most recently on a TV show. But nothing I ever dreamed up in those fictional accounts could compare to the ridiculousness I encountered when I took a job at an actual tech company, a software maker called HubSpot. This book is the chronicle of my time at the company, and its not satire. Everything in Disrupted really happened. With some individuals I have used real names, but in most cases I have invented pseudonyms and nicknames. Some current and former HubSpotters agreed to be interviewed for the book, but only on condition that our conversations remain off the record. Some people were afraid to talk to me at all. At the time I thought their concerns were silly. But as things turned out, those people may have been right to be afraid.

Regarding terminology: When I use the term Silicon Valley I do not mean to denote an actual geographic regionthe sixty-mile peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose, where the original technology companies were built. Instead, like Hollywood, or Wall Street, Silicon Valley has become a metaphorical name for an industry, one that exists in Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Boston, and countless other places, as well as the San Francisco Bay Area.

The term bubble, as I use it, refers not only to the economic bubble in which the valuation of some tech start-ups went crazy but also to the mindset of the people working inside technology companies, the true believers and Kool-Aid drinkers, the people who live inside their own filter bubble, brimming with self-confidence and self-regard, impervious to criticism, immunized against reality, unaware of how ridiculous they appear to the outside world.

HubSpot, where I worked from April 2013 to December 2014, was part of that bubble. In November 2014, the company floated a successful IPO, and it now has a market value of nearly $2 billion. But this book is about more than HubSpot. This is a story about what its like to try to reinvent yourself and start a new career in your fifties, particularly in an industry that is by and large hostile to older workers. Its a story about how work itself has changed, and how some companies that claim to be making the world a better place are in fact doing the opposite.

Myths and mythmaking are rampant in Silicon Valley. I wrote this book because I wanted to provide a more realistic look at life inside a unicorn start-up and to puncture the popular mythology about heroic entrepreneurs. HubSpots 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.

At the heart of the book is my own sometimes painful and humbling journey of self-discovery, as I attempted to transform myself from a journalist into a marketing professional at a software start-up. My hope is that my story offers an overdue behind-the-scenes look at life inside a start-up during a period when the tech industry had temporarily lost its mindand when I, for better or worse, did the same.