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bhalpin 's review for:
Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
by Dan Lyons
A bitter, nasty, very entertaining and actually important book.
The most fun part is Lyons dishing on the idiocy of Hubspot and the people around him. Anyone who has ever worked anywhere--startup or not--where employees are required to "drink the Kool Aid" will recognize both the ridiculous excesses of the Hubspot culture and Lyons' "Am I crazy, or is this complete bullshit?" reaction. Everyone who has ever had a job anywhere will recognize the poisonous office politics, the little fiefdoms that take root in an organization, and the way competence is a secondary, tertiary, or lower concern in determining who moves up.
I also enjoyed the demystifying of not just Hubspot, but startup culture in general. While these companies and their founders are lionized in American culture, Lyons does a great job of showing that these people fundamentally have no idea what they're doing, and that they hype is the real product. (Having worked very briefly in a startup with wildly incompetent management, I can vouch for this.) The book also shows exactly how the bad behavior that we've become accustomed to seeing from tech bros is facilitated by throwing a lot of money at people whose only experience at working with other people was that one charity event they did with their fraternity.
About two thirds of the way through, Lyons gets to what I believed to be the really important part of the book: he breaks down, in a clear, understandable way the fact that startups are essentially a long con. The venture capitalists throw money at founders who don't know what they're doing, and they cover their incompetence with buzzwords and never really figure out how to make money. If the company and the venture capitalists can create a wave that takes them to an IPO, they get rich selling stock in a company that doesn't make money. It's a good scam, but Lyons shows that the marks are not just the investors who buy stock once the company goes public, but also the workers who are conned into believing they've been a part of something revolutionary and disruptive, when really they've just churned through a couple years of 70-hour weeks just to make a handful of people really wealthy.
An essential corrective to the tidal wave of bullshit that covers most coverage of the startup economy.
The most fun part is Lyons dishing on the idiocy of Hubspot and the people around him. Anyone who has ever worked anywhere--startup or not--where employees are required to "drink the Kool Aid" will recognize both the ridiculous excesses of the Hubspot culture and Lyons' "Am I crazy, or is this complete bullshit?" reaction. Everyone who has ever had a job anywhere will recognize the poisonous office politics, the little fiefdoms that take root in an organization, and the way competence is a secondary, tertiary, or lower concern in determining who moves up.
I also enjoyed the demystifying of not just Hubspot, but startup culture in general. While these companies and their founders are lionized in American culture, Lyons does a great job of showing that these people fundamentally have no idea what they're doing, and that they hype is the real product. (Having worked very briefly in a startup with wildly incompetent management, I can vouch for this.) The book also shows exactly how the bad behavior that we've become accustomed to seeing from tech bros is facilitated by throwing a lot of money at people whose only experience at working with other people was that one charity event they did with their fraternity.
About two thirds of the way through, Lyons gets to what I believed to be the really important part of the book: he breaks down, in a clear, understandable way the fact that startups are essentially a long con. The venture capitalists throw money at founders who don't know what they're doing, and they cover their incompetence with buzzwords and never really figure out how to make money. If the company and the venture capitalists can create a wave that takes them to an IPO, they get rich selling stock in a company that doesn't make money. It's a good scam, but Lyons shows that the marks are not just the investors who buy stock once the company goes public, but also the workers who are conned into believing they've been a part of something revolutionary and disruptive, when really they've just churned through a couple years of 70-hour weeks just to make a handful of people really wealthy.
An essential corrective to the tidal wave of bullshit that covers most coverage of the startup economy.