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Tech Journalist Lacerates Startup That Hired Him
Apparently the brass at HubSpot, a tech startup in Cambridge, MA that recently won top honors from a local business journal as the Boston's best place to work [hubspot.com], had forgotten Aesop's fable about the frog and scorpion [aesopfables.com]. So they went and hired Daniel Lyons, the fiftysomething career technology journalist best known for his "Fake Steve Jobs" [fakesteve.net] blog, to their marketing staff in 2013, even though he didn't know the first thing about marketing (as Lyons freely admits in his piece). Lyons worked at Hubspot for a year and a half before quitting to publish a tell-all book on his time there; an excerpt ("My Year in Startup Hell" [fortune.com]) has been published by Fortune, describing a corporate culture that sounds like a mixture of Animal House and Scientology, along with reflections such as this one:
Another thing I’m learning in my new job is that while people still refer to this business as the “tech industry,” in truth it is no longer really about technology at all. “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 startups. “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.”
That’s what HubSpot is doing. That’s why venture capitalists have sunk so much money into HubSpot, and why they believe HubSpot will have a successful IPO. That’s also why HubSpot hires so many young people. That’s what investors want to see: a bunch of young people, having a blast, talking about changing the world. It sells.
Lyons notes that he was given an employee agreement to sign when he joined, which included a non-disparagement clause, but he never returned the form.
There are really four stories here.
HubSpot. Is this East Coast Unicorn [streetwise.co] in "inbound marketing" [hubspot.com] (blogs, free content) technology mostly hype?
Tech startups. Is Lyons' experience typical of today's "unicorn" startups, and are they mostly overvalued [cnbc.com] with unsustainable business models?
Lyons' book. Disrupted is available for pre-order on Amazon [amazon.com], and Lyons has been busy promoting it on Twitter [twitter.com]. In the background, shady stuff has been going down. HubSpot's Chief Marketing Officer Mike Volpe was fired for allegedly making an aggressive effort to obtain the book manuscript [betaboston.com] before publication, and another top executive resigned; the FBI and the US Department of Justice investigated, but did not press charges.
Daniel Lyons. This is the same guy who once wrote article after article in Forbes sympathetic to The SCO Group [freerepublic.com] in their bogus IP lawsuits against Linux and IBM. Lyons didn't state that the Darl McBride and Co were morally justified, but did seem to imply they might have the law on their side. He eventually admitted he had been "snowed" by SCO [forbes.com]. Perhaps his demonstrated willingness to "drink the koolaid" made him attractive to the folks running HubSpot?
