Disrupted

by Dan Lyons

  From now on I won’t have to deal with Marcia, Jan, and Ashley. I will have my own staff. I’ve already talked to Atticus, the creative director. He loves the idea and already has ideas for the design. One of his guys will make up some wire frames. Finally, I will be turned loose to do what I was supposed to be doing all along.

  The next day, however, when I mention all this to Spinner, she doesn’t seem excited. In fact, she looks concerned.

  “Who else was in the meeting?” she asks.

  “What? It was just me and Brian and Dharmesh.”

  “Well, that was a mistake. You should have had a witness.”

  “A witness? What do you mean? Why would I need a witness?”

  “You need someone who can back you up, who can vouch for the fact that Halligan really said that.”

  Spinner explains that just because Halligan and Dharmesh are the co-founders, and just because they approve something, that doesn’t mean it will happen. Halligan probably forgot everything we said as soon as he walked out of the room, and he will never think of it again, she tells me. Nobody will feel any obligation to do what Halligan said in some meeting that none of them attended. As for Dharmesh, he’s hardly ever here at all.

  I can’t believe this. I’ve never worked in a place, or even heard of a place, where the CEO can give an order and the people below him just ignore it.

  I send an email to Cranium and tell him about my big meeting with Halligan and Dharmesh. I explain to him that they have approved my idea to launch a new publication.

  Cranium writes back and says that this sounds great. He just needs some time to get the pieces in place. The Inbound conference is right around the corner, and everybody in the marketing department is going to be overwhelmed until the conference is over. Let’s just get through Inbound, he says, and then we can circle back on this.

  The conference takes place over the course of four days in August, at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Five thousand people are here to come together, get inspired, and be remarkable. They want to learn how to crush it, how to be awesome, how to make one plus one equal three. Arianna Huffington gives a keynote speech. Dharmesh talks about being lovable. Halligan rambles on about the Grateful Dead—he’s a huge fan—and then starts playing air guitar and doing a weird hippie dance, unaccompanied by music. The dance goes on for too long. It’s painful to watch. The crowd eats it up.

  After the conference Sasha and I take the kids on a rafting trip in Maine, in a place so remote that there’s no cell service. We will be gone until Labor Day. I figure that in September, when everyone returns from the holiday, I will sit down with Cranium and start scoping out my project. Up in Maine we have no Internet connection, thus no tablets or laptops. We play cards and board games, cook on a fire outside the cabin, and hang our wet clothes up on the rafters to dry. The kids make new friends and go swimming and fishing. For the first time in months, Sasha is free of pain; she goes five days without having a migraine, a new record. We’re all together and enjoying one another. The kids aren’t fighting. It’s bliss.

  For the first time since joining HubSpot, I feel happy about my work. At the Inbound conference I gave a speech about storytelling and it went over well. Though things were rocky for the first four months, it seems that now I have figured out how to navigate the company and get what I want. Maybe I’m not so bad at this corporate stuff after all!

  But when I return to work after Labor Day, I get no word from Cranium. Before I can set a meeting to discuss our next steps, Zack pulls me aside. Some decisions have been made, he says. We are going to redesign the blog. Grumpy Jan is getting a promotion. Zack says maybe I can be an adviser to her.

  “Sure,” I say. “Sounds good. I’m going to be working on the new thing anyway. But I’m glad to help her out.”

  “Yeah, see, that’s the thing,” he says. “You’re still going to be working on the blog. They’re giving you your own separate section. It’s part of the redesign.”

  From now on, Zack says, the blog will have several sub-blogs. I will be writing one of those sub-blogs, all by myself. That way I can write my articles without interfering with Jan’s lead-generation goals.

  “But I’m supposed to be launching a whole new site,” I tell him. “Inbound. The online magazine.”

  Zack knows about my project. He knows that I pitched the idea to Halligan and Dharmesh, and that they approved it. Nevertheless he says he doesn’t know what happened to that idea, but for now it isn’t going to happen.

  “Zack,” I say, “my idea was approved by the two guys who run the company. How can people just ignore what those guys tell them?”

  Zack says he doesn’t know how people can do that.

  “And I talked to Cranium, and he signed off on it too,” I say. “This was weeks ago. He told me to wait until after the Inbound conference and then we’d do it.”

  Zack knows this, too, but again he pleads ignorance. This wasn’t his decision. He’s just telling me what’s been decided. When I ask who made the decision, he says he doesn’t know.

  I’m trying not to sound pissed, because nobody ever raises their voice around here, but in a newsroom if this happened people would be slamming doors and turning the air blue with profanity. We’re out in a public space, a sort of lobby with couches and chairs, with lots of people streaming by.

  “Zack.” I’m working very hard to keep my voice down. I glance around to see if anyone is nearby. “Zack, what kind of place is this? You’re telling me that things just happen, and nobody knows why? Decisions get made, but nobody knows who made them? Does nobody make the decisions? Do the decisions make themselves?”

  “Well I think what they want is just—”

  “Who’s they?” I say, cutting him off. “You see what I mean? Who’s they? All I know is that someone just fucked me, and I don’t know who. There’s a dick in my ass, but it’s a mystery dick. Did you make the decision, and you just don’t want to tell me? Did Wingman make the decision? Did Cranium? Did Halligan change his mind? You keep saying they did this, and they want that, but who are we talking about? And why did they make this decision? What were their reasons? Why didn’t I get a chance to argue my case? It’s like a voice just comes out of a burning bush and tells us what to do. There’s a man behind the curtain, like in The Wizard of Oz. Is that where we are, Zack? Are we in the merry old land of Oz?”

  Zack remains calm. He has no doubt anticipated that I would be pissed. He says that who knows, maybe someday they will let me launch the online magazine, but for now this is what the team needs. At a place like HubSpot it’s important to be a team player.

  Zack tries to spin it. He says that in a way I’m getting what I asked for. I’m going to have my own project. Along those lines, I now will have my own monthly traffic goal, a number that I have to hit. Wingman will set the number.

  There’s not much I can do here. I could confront Wingman and Cranium, and demand to know why they’re ignoring a direct order from their bosses. I could go back to Halligan and Dharmesh and ask them to intercede on my behalf. But I’m starting to think that Halligan and Dharmesh don’t really have much juice around here. And they have bigger things to worry about. As Spinner told me, Halligan probably forgot everything we talked about the minute he walked out of our meeting.

  Spinner was right. I played it wrong. I thought I could jump over Cranium and Wingman, but they have leapt up and blocked my shot. I tell myself that at least I tried, and now I know that I’ll just have to wait out a year and then leave. It’s over. I’m done.

  I force a smile. I tell Zack thanks for the update. I tell him I’m sorry about my outburst, and I can’t wait to get started on this new project.

  “Oh,” Zack says, “there’s one more thing.”

  The content factory has been getting overcrowded, he tells me. So in addition to getting my own little blog, I am going to be moving to a new location, away from the blog team, in the telemarketing call center. It’s the loudest room in the b
uilding. People call it the spider monkey room. Zack assures me that this move will only be temporary. HubSpot is renovating space on the fourth floor, and eventually our team will move up there.

  Once again I give him my best “team player” smile and tell him this all sounds great.

  “You know,” I say, “I could really use your advice on how to set up this new blog. Do you think you could help me out? I love your writing. Would you be willing to maybe write some articles for the blog? I think we can do something really great with this.”

  Zack says sure, he’d love to do that. I tell him I’ll get on his calendar and set a meeting so we can discuss some ideas.

  A few days later, I arrive at the office and find that my desk is empty. The blog girls, smirking, say they don’t know what happened to my stuff. I go to the telemarketing center and wander around. There, on a desk against a wall, piled in a sad heap, I find my belongings: my laptop, my monitor, my books, pictures of my kids. Someone has just tossed my things into a cardboard box, carried them here, and plunked them on a desk.

  Ten

  Life in the Boiler Room

  Hi, is that Jeff?… Hey Jeff, this is Pete from HubSpot up in Boston. How’s the weather down there in Tampa?… I bet it is! Hey, I wish we’d get some of that sunshine up here, right?… So Jeff, I saw that you downloaded one of our e-books, so I thought I would follow up to see if I could answer any questions you might have… Right. Sure. Okay. Well when would be a good time?… Jeff, what’s your marketing plan this year? What are your goals? Have you thought about what you need to do to hit those goals?… Okay, sure. So when would be a good time for us to have a talk?

  Pete is a big ginger-haired guy who moonlights as a cheerleader for the Boston Celtics. Loud Pete, I call him. He stands ten feet away from me, wearing a headset and reciting variations of that script, again and again, all day long, in a booming voice. He laughs, he roars, he cracks himself up. He asks questions, gets hung up on, dials again. All. Day. Long. There are dozens more like him in this room.

  This is the telemarketing center, and it reminds me of the boiler-room operations you see in the movies, with people arranged in rows, some standing, some sitting, packed in close to each other, barking into headsets. Imagine Glengarry Glen Ross, but instead of four sales guys there are a hundred, and they are all in their early twenties, all talking at once, all saying the same things, over and over again. To be sure, the telemarketers at HubSpot are not selling penny stocks or fake real estate. They are selling a real product. I don’t see anything fraudulent or illegal in what they are doing. It’s just tacky and low-tech. At HubSpot these people are called business development representatives, or BDRs. They wear shorts and T-shirts, with baseball hats on backward, and drink beer at their desks.

  Officially, HubSpot’s products are supposed to be stamping out cold-calling, just like we’re supposed to be stamping out spam. Our sales pitch is that if you buy our software you won’t need to hire an army of outbound sales reps who spend their days blindly calling people, because our software will generate inbound leads and bring the customers to you.

  Yet here we are, operating an old-fashioned call center, with a bunch of low-paid kids calling thousands of people, day after day. HubSpot doesn’t keep this room a secret, but the company doesn’t talk about it much, either. It’s not exactly a lovable, magical, one-plus-one-equals-three kind of place. The truth is that most tech companies do some selling over the phone, and for a simple reason: It’s cheap. Oracle, a $40 billion software company, has started hiring thousands of college students and cramming them into call centers, as a way to lower its selling costs.

  Tech companies refer to these operations as “inside sales,” which sounds more respectable than “telemarketing.” While a lot of tech companies do some selling over the phone, from what I’ve been told HubSpot’s operation is more aggressive than most. But it has to be. We’re selling to small businesses, and our software isn’t expensive. The basic version costs $200 a month, and the “pro” version cost $800 a month. Our average customer spends about $500 a month, or $6,000 a year. These are not big accounts. The only affordable way to sell to them is over the phone. As a CMO friend of mine puts it, “The lower end of the market is a dial-for-dollars segment.”

  HubSpot isn’t the only software company using a low-cost sales model. Another friend of mine works at a software company that’s about the same size as HubSpot and engages in the same kind of touchy-feely rhetoric while behind the scenes operating the same kind of call center. The company’s investors are demanding astronomical growth rates, and while cold-calling thousands of leads may be a brute-force, blunt-instrument tactic, it’s the only way they can hit their numbers.

  “When you get a hard-charging sales culture in place, and you’re trying to keep up insane growth rates, all that high-minded preaching about how the New Economy means not doing things like they used to do in the Bad Old Days—all that stuff goes out the window, and they bring in Alec Baldwin to give his steak knives speech,” my friend says. “Our recruiters go out to college campuses and load up the slave ship with a shit ton of identical-looking lax bros. We put them in a frat house with a big brass bell to ring when they close a deal and a basketball hoop arcade game. They walk around shooting hoops while wearing wireless headsets and talking to their victims. We have an army of these people.”

  So does HubSpot, and the company also has created software that keeps the salespeople on their toes. Our website embeds a tracking code on the computers of people who visit the site. If someone comes back for another look, and if it’s someone who has filled out a form and given us their email and phone number, a spider monkey will get an alert on his screen and call that person and launch into a spiel: “Hi, Cheryl? It’s Eddie from HubSpot. I see you’re looking at our website and I wonder if I can help you find something.”

  Maybe this tactic lands customers, though it seems more likely to annoy someone or scare them. The sales bros presumably know how creepy this must be for the people who receive these calls, but what can they do? They have a number to hit. Spider monkeys are paid $35,000 a year to smile and dial, with a bonus based on performance. This is the lowest rung on the sales ladder. It’s almost a form of hazing. If you want to become a high-level (and better paid) salesperson, you first must make your bones in the telemarketing pit.

  The call center is about the size of a football field, with redbrick walls, a high ceiling, exposed beams, and no sound dampening. The noise level is astounding. When I was nineteen years old I dropped out of college and spent a few years working in a textile mill. This room seems about as noisy as the mill.

  HubSpot’s offices are in an old furniture factory, built in the middle of the nineteenth century. Except for the free beer, the job of a HubSpot BDR doesn’t seem much better than the job his great-grandfather might have had in this same room a hundred years ago. The old sweatshop has just been turned into a new sweatshop. In some ways the new one is worse. You spend your day tethered to a desk, with software programs tracking everything you do, counting how many calls you make, reminding you constantly that you’re falling short of your quota and could be out of a job next month.

  My noise-canceling headphones can’t drown out the din. I try wearing foam earplugs under the headphones, and it’s still not enough. Even after I plug the headphones into my computer and find some classical music, I can still hear Loud Pete and his comrades barking into their headsets, but at least the sound is muted.

  The call center is like a scene from Dante’s Inferno, a ring of hell. Have Wingman and Cranium sent me here as punishment for trying to go over their heads? Are they trying to make me miserable? If so, it’s working.

  On the other hand, my exile to the spider monkey room is a kind of gift, because now I am seeing another side of HubSpot and learning how the company really operates. It turns out that HubSpot has a split personality. On one side there is the touchy-feely stuff about the culture code and having HEART, which comes fr
om Dharmesh. On the other side is Halligan’s domain, which is this room, where the only thing that matters is making your numbers, and nobody gives a shit about having HEART.

  The spider monkey room has one simple rule: Make your numbers, and you live. Fall short, and you get canned. Guys like Loud Pete operate under tremendous pressure and against long odds. They’ll hit the phone all day. On average, one call out of eighty lands someone who agrees to look at a demonstration of the software.

  That’s all the spider monkeys have to do, just get someone to say yes to a demo. At that point the lead gets passed to someone else. Those people are paid better than the telemarketing people, but they too operate under insane pressure. Selling software is a grueling job, and it’s especially rough at HubSpot, which imposes monthly quotas on its sales rep rather than quarterly or annual quotas that other companies use.

  “Your life hits reset every month. It’s a hamster wheel,” one high-level sales rep says. “That’s why the sales reps are so young. There’s hardly anybody who has been here more than five years. People don’t last. People who are forty years old, who are married and have kids, they don’t want to live like this.”

  Halligan is a former sales guy. He knows the kind of pressure he is putting on his reps. He is aware that no one can do this job for long without burning out, and he is okay with that. The spider monkeys are not being hired with the expectation that they will spend their careers at HubSpot. They are being rounded up to work for a few years, then go somewhere else.

  I don’t doubt that Dharmesh really does care about creating a company that people can love, but I am equally sure that Halligan cares only about the numbers. While Dharmesh obsesses about the five principles that make up HEART, Halligan’s big metric is something called VORP, or value over replacement player. The idea comes from Major League Baseball, where it is used to set prices on players. At HubSpot, VORP means evaluating the difference between what you are paid and the least amount the company could pay someone else to do your job. It’s a vicious metric, with only one goal, which is to drive the price of labor as low as possible.