A review by philtor
Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

3.0

Early on in this book I would have given it maybe 2 stars. It seemed a bit too whiny and complainy and I kind of wondered how the guy was going to ever get another job anywhere else after writing this book. But the more I read of Lyons' experience as a 50-something in a cultish startup full of 20-somethings the more I understood how he could become so bitter about the experience. I'd never heard of HubSpot, the startup he worked for, but I guess that's because they do marketing SaaS for Marketeers - yeah, sounds sketchy. Lyons recounts his ~18 months working for HubSpot. There's a lot of humor in Lyons' retelling, but you also get the distinct impression that it wasn't so funny actually living it. The company doesn't make any profit, has huge losses and high cost of sales and yet somehow still manages to go public just before running out of money and be valued in the low $Billions. While I've kind of suspected that we're in another tech bubble, after reading this account I'm pretty certain we are. Also, the Epilog takes a dark turn: It seems that higher ups at HubSpot were not really eager for Lyons' book to come out and were willing to do legally and ethically sketchy things to find out what was in it before it was published.