Disrupted

by Dan Lyons

  WHY WE LOVE CERVICAL CANCER

  (AND YOU SHOULD TOO!)

  and

  MILEY CYRUS AND CERVICAL CANCER:

  10 THINGS THEY HAVE IN COMMON

  Those headlines are so good that I want to print them out in seventy-two-point headline typeface and paste them on the wall. The BTG is never spoken of again. But it remains online, because, as one manager tells me, if they take it down that might hurt Ashley’s feelings. Six months later, Ashley gets a promotion.

  These are the bozos. They are graspers and self-promoters, shameless resume padders, people who describe themselves as “product marketing professionals,” “growth hackers,” “creative rockstar interns,” and “public speakers.” They create websites to build their “personal brands,” with huge photos of themselves and lists of their accomplishments. They have a Toastmasters club, where they take turns giving presentations and sharing tips on the art of making PowerPoint slide decks. They dream up ridiculous activities, like having a scavenger hunt in Kendall Square or going kayaking on the Charles River.

  Marcia and Jan, who run the blog, decide to have a “content hackathon,” where they will round up a bunch of people and work late into the evening, brainstorming ideas for blog posts. On the day of the hackathon I’m packing my bag to go home when Olivia, an intern, asks why I’m leaving. I tell her I have two kids at home and dinner waiting for me, but in addition to that, I don’t see the point of pulling an all-nighter just to write some blog posts.

  She looks at me as if I’m an imbecile. “It’s a hackathon,” she says.

  “I know,” I say, “but why have a hackathon? If we need more blog posts, why can’t we just write a few extra posts over the next few weeks and bank them up?”

  She pauses. She really is a very nice young woman, and I like her a lot. “There’s food,” she says.

  I go home.

  The greatest of all bozo events is Fearless Friday. This is organized by Jordan, the twenty-something manager who has read Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In and been inspired by Sandberg’s admonition that women should “do what you would do if you weren’t afraid.” Jordan seems to believe that Sandberg’s admonition can be used as the basis of a one-day exercise, which she dubs Fearless Friday.

  She sends us this email:

  We’ve got a brilliant team and, at times, it can be hard to innovate due to fear of failure and the pressure of our day-to-day goals. That’s why we’re creating this day to exist in total isolation to work on ANY project that you’re passionate about. The only goal: Be Fearless.

  I read the email and forget about it. A couple weeks later, on a Thursday afternoon, I’m sitting at my desk when Ashley from the blog team suddenly asks me, “So what are you going to do for Fearless Friday?”

  “Oh,” I say, “when is that?”

  “It’s tomorrow!” Her big eyes widen with alarm. “Did you not sign up? You were supposed to sign up! Each team is doing a different project.”

  “I think I’m going to skip it.”

  “You can’t skip it! You have to pick one of the activities.”

  “What are the choices?” I say, filled with dread.

  “It’s all on the wiki,” she said. “I’ll send you a link.”

  “No, look, you can just tell me.”

  She is, after all, sitting right next to me.

  “No, I’ll send it to you,” she says. I guess she thinks it will be good for me to learn how to do these things by myself.

  I pull up the link. The idea of Fearless Friday is that we will break into small teams and spend the day doing something fearless. That can be anything we want, but there is one thing we cannot do, which is our actual job. No matter how busy you are, the prime directive is this: No working on your actual job.

  There’s no getting out of this. There are no exceptions. I have no idea by whose authority we are commanded to do these things. Jordan is not my boss, but here she is, making us all stop work for a day. After doing some research, I discover that Jordan was one of Cranium’s first hires, and that in fact he knew her before he came to HubSpot. They worked together at a software company where Cranium was a marketing manager and Jordan was a college intern. At that company, Jordan’s uncle was the VP of marketing. He was the one who hired Cranium. He’s also a longtime HubSpot customer.

  In other words, at HubSpot Jordan can do anything she wants. In this case, I believe Jordan wants to demonstrate her leadership abilities by appointing herself the leader of our whole group for a whole day. Marketing people are obsessed with leadership. Attend any marketing conference and you will find someone giving a speech to an auditorium full of glassy-eyed marketing drones, telling them that they are all leaders.

  Jordan has added a clever twist by attaching her exercise to Sandberg’s feminist manifesto. Tech companies like HubSpot are sensitive, and rightfully so, about having so few women in top positions. Connecting Fearless Friday to the cause of female empowerment pretty much forces the company to go along with it, although I doubt that anyone in management is paying enough attention to know that Fearless Friday is even taking place. The linkage to feminism also makes it impossible for me to skip, because if I do I will risk looking like a classic middle-aged male chauvinist, the old guy who won’t take part in an exercise just because it’s being led by a woman.

  According to the wiki page, other people in the department have already appointed themselves team leaders and decided what their teams will do. I don’t want to think about what kind of fearless things these people have come up with. I have visions of things like jumping out of airplanes, wrestling bears, or seeing who can stand on the subway tracks for the longest time. Luckily it’s nothing that extreme. One group, under the direction of team leader Jan, will create personal accounts on BuzzFeed and each write one post for that site. Another team will make paintings to decorate our offices. A third will do something that involves sending thank-you notes to customers. Those are the choices.

  The next morning we all gather in the big conference room on the first floor, where Jordan stands at the podium, grinning like an activity director at summer camp. “How will we know that this day has been a success?” she asks rhetorically. “Well, just by doing this, just by being here, right now, we’ve already succeeded!”

  Well then, I think, if that’s the case, then let’s declare victory and go home. It’s a nice day. I could play some golf. I don’t actually play golf. I don’t even like golf. But I would rather play golf than do this.

  Unfortunately, going home is not an option.

  I join Jan’s group and settle down to write my BuzzFeed post. After a grueling hour, I’m done. I spend the rest of the day wandering around, checking out the other teams. The best by far are the women who are making paintings. Their team leader is Olivia, who a few months ago was an intern but now seems to have become a full-time employee. They have big pieces of poster board and jars of paint from an art supply store, all spread out on the carpet in the main conference room. The paintings are ghastly. I pretend to love them. I ask if I can take photographs. The painters proudly hold up their work, beaming with pride. One of them has created a painting of the HubSpot sprocket logo. Another has just used a paintbrush to write words: “Marketing is not (just) arts and crafts,” her poster says.

  At the end of the day we regroup in the first-floor conference room to discuss our results. What have we learned? What bold new outside-the-box ideas can we take away from this day and apply to HubSpot’s marketing plans? The team leaders give presentations.

  At home that night, I tell my kids about this and show them the photos of the paintings. They think this is hilarious. They are now eight years old, in the third grade. They claim their classmates could make better paintings than what the grown-ups at HubSpot have produced. Even preschoolers could do better, they say.

  The following Monday, when I leave for work, they taunt me: “Have a good day at kindergarten, Daddy! Have fun making your paintings!” At the o
ffice I find that everyone is talking about Fearless Friday and what an awesome success it was. Emails are whizzing around, with everyone praising Jordan for doing such an awesome job.

  A few weeks later Jordan announces that Fearless Friday was such a huge success that we’re going to be doing it again.

  “Welcome to the world of start-ups,” my friend Harvey says when I tell him about Fearless Friday. Harvey is about my age, maybe a little older. He lives in San Francisco. He spent years working at big tech companies, but a few years ago he left a very cushy gig and took a job as a vice president at a start-up, a tiny place that had less than one hundred employees. Eleven months after he joined, the company was acquired for more than $1 billion. Harvey won’t tell me how much he made, but I’m guessing it’s more than $10 million. Now he has joined another start-up, this time with a C-level title, and is hoping to do it all over again.

  Harvey is one of the people who encouraged me to bail out of journalism and take the job at HubSpot. He’s calling to check in and see how things are going. I tell him I’m frustrated. It’s not just batshit crazy stuff like Fearless Friday. It’s everything. Decisions get made but no one knows who made them. Who’s in charge? Nobody. Everybody. One day we are told the company will focus on big enterprise customers and that this decision has been etched in stone and will not change. Two weeks later, we’re going back to selling to small businesses.

  “I’m worried,” I tell him. “This place seems out of control.”

  Harvey says everything I’m describing about HubSpot is absolutely normal. “You know what the big secret of all these start-ups is?” he tells me. “The big secret is that nobody knows what they’re doing. When it comes to management, it’s amateur hour. They just make it up as they go along.”

  Examples abound of tech start-ups trying to bring in more experienced people who end up leaving, sometimes citing a lack of “culture fit.” Evan Spiegel, the twenty-five-year-old founder of Snapchat, a photo sharing application, raised $1 billion in venture funding and realized, or was told by his investors, that he needed to hire people who could run a business and make money. Spiegel brought in veterans from Facebook and Google, then lost eight top executives in less than a year, with some people lasting only six months, according to Business Insider. Then there is twenty-two-year-old Lucas Duplan, whose wildly overhyped start-up, Clinkle, hired a well-known VP of engineering only to have the guy quit after one day. Soon after that, five other executives also abandoned ship.

  Even some of the biggest and best-known new tech companies are totally dysfunctional. Twitter, for example, seems to have survived in spite of its management rather than because of it. The company is valued at $13 billion and not long ago was valued at more than $30 billion. Yet Twitter has never reported an annual profit, and has lost billions of dollars. For nine years Twitter has undergone wave after wave of management upheaval, hiring and firing CEOs, reshuffling, reorganizing, announcing new business plans, making acquisitions. The people responsible for this mess have become incredibly wealthy. Two of Twitter’s co-founders, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey, are billionaires.

  Dorsey once had blue hair and played music in the street. For a while he went around dressing like Steve Jobs. Then he was obsessed with Japanese culture. Then he was going to become a fashion designer. Then he reportedly wanted to be mayor of New York. After being pushed out of Twitter he started a payment company called Square, which raised $590 million in venture funding and in November 2015 successfully sold shares to the public, despite having lost nearly $500 million—half a billion dollars!—in just four years. In 2005, Dorsey became CEO of Twitter again, so he now runs two companies.

  Williams left Twitter and founded Medium, but by 2015, after three years in business, he still was not sure what he wanted that company to be, and he started firing people he had just hired. Williams also runs a venture capital firm, Obvious Ventures, which in 2015 raised $123,456,789—get it?—from limited partners such as noted technologist Leonardo DiCaprio.

  A third Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, has a net worth of $200 million and since leaving Twitter has launched two companies, Jelly and Super. Nobody, including Stone himself, seems to understand what these companies do. In one interview, trying to explain Super, Stone said: “I know this is eye-rollingly, hallucinogenically optimistic… but our mission is to build software that fosters empathy.”

  Now that is some pure, unadulterated bozo talk. Unfortunately, such rhetoric has become the rule rather than the exception inside tech start-ups.

  By the occasion of the inaugural Fearless Friday I’ve come to realize that HubSpot is just as crazy as the rest of them. But all of HubSpot’s lofty bullshit about inspiring people and being remarkable and creating lovable content might actually be part of a cynical, and almost brilliant, strategy. HubSpot is playing the game, saying the kind of ridiculous things that investors now expect to hear from start-ups. HubSpot is feeding the ducks.

  The happy!! awesome!! rhetoric masks the fact that beneath the covers, there is chaos.

  “HubSpot was the first software company I worked for, and it was extremely eye-opening,” says a salesperson who joined the company during its early days and has since worked for other early-stage tech companies, which were equally clueless and out of control. “People in these companies live day-to-day. They don’t know how to run a sales team. They don’t have a sales process. They don’t even know what the product itself is going to be. The product itself keeps changing. It’s mind-boggling, the amount of time and money that gets wasted.”

  Nine

  In Which I Make a Very Big Mistake

  By August, four months into my tenure at HubSpot, I am ready to give up. I’m stuck in the content factory writing articles for imbeciles. I cannot do this for a living. I’ve already appealed to Wingman and pitched him on a project that would be a better use of my time—the one where we launch an online magazine called Inbound, with me in charge—and he has rejected it outright. As I see it, there is only one way out at this point. I can leap over Wingman and go straight to the top. I will pitch my idea directly to Halligan and Shah. They’re the guys who run the company. And they are the ones who hired me.

  To be sure, Wingman isn’t going to appreciate me doing an end run around him. On the other hand, what do I have to lose? I’m not going to stay in the content factory, banging out listicles and how-to articles for Marketing Mary. If Halligan and Shah don’t put me in charge of something worthwhile, I will put in my year and leave anyway.

  I find a day and time when Halligan and Shah will both be in the office and send them a calendar invite, asking for a meeting. They accept. We meet in one of the tiny conference rooms on the second floor. It’s just the three of us. I explain to them that I’ve now been working here for four months, and that I’ve been stuck in the content factory, where I’m cranking out articles like “What Is HTML?”

  “There’s no point in having me here if that’s what I’m going to do,” I say. “And that’s not what you hired me to do.”

  It seems to me that these guys are exactly the kind of rule-breaking iconoclasts who will appreciate my chutzpah. These are start-up guys. Isn’t this the HubSpotty thing to do? I’m showing initiative! I’m being remarkable! One of the famous stories at HubSpot is about a young sales guy who had a huge argument with Halligan about creating a new division in sales. The sales guy turned out to be right, and he now runs that division.

  “Here’s what I think we should do,” I say. “I think we should create a really great publication, separate from the blog, where we can publish articles aimed at the kind of people you want to reach. We can’t do this on the blog. It gets in the way of the lead generation, and then the sales guys start screaming, and Wingman comes in and tells us to start writing more dumb shit to attract more Mary leads. But a new publication, separate from the blog, could do everything you want to do. We’d have great art, nice layouts, smart writing, interviews with really interesting people. We have reall
y talented designers in our art department, and they’d love to work on something like this.”

  We could call the publication Inbound and tie it in with the Inbound conference, I tell them. I could coordinate with Tracy, who runs brand and buzz, and we could draw on the people who speak at the Inbound conference. We could either get them to write for us or run interviews with them. We could incorporate video. I show them a few sites like this that other companies are producing. Microsoft has one called Stories, run by a friend of mine whose official title is chief storyteller. Qualcomm has a publication called Spark, run by a former USA Today journalist, that is doing beautiful work.

  They love the idea. Dharmesh is particularly enthusiastic. He leaps up and goes to the whiteboard and starts sketching out ideas for a social network that he wants to develop. He thinks we could combine our ideas. We could blend content and social media, and create something that works a bit like LinkedIn.

  The thing Dharmesh is describing is far beyond what I imagined. I’d just been thinking of creating an online magazine to promote the HubSpot brand. But Dharmesh wants to take this to a different level. What he has in mind would be something entirely new in the world of media. With the right resources, we might do something amazing. I’m thrilled. I desperately want to work on this.

  “You have our blessing,” Halligan says. “Go tell Cranium that we said yes. We want you to do this.”

  That night I go home feeling like a conquering hero. “I did it!” I tell Sasha. “I pitched my idea to Halligan and Dharmesh, and they loved it! Not only that, but they’re making it even better than what I pitched them. They’re going to put me in charge of my own publication. It’s perfect!”