by Dan Lyons
Wingman seems taken aback.
“He was content marketer of the year in 2012,” he says.
“Oh, right,” I say, as if I’ve heard of that award. I feel a twinge of sadness that such a thing even exists.
“It’s pretty huge for us to get him,” Wingman says.
“I can imagine,” I say. “That’s great. I can’t wait to meet him.”
After we hang up I do a Google search about the Content Marketer of the Year award. It turns to be one of forty prizes given annually by a guy in Cleveland, Ohio, who runs an organization called the Content Marketing Institute. Trotsky did indeed win a coveted CMI award. Brandon the Sales Lion, the pool installer turned marketing superstar we learned about during our HubSpot training classes, also took home a trophy, in the Visionary category.
It seems to me that getting a new boss can only be a good thing. I’ve screwed things up pretty badly with Wingman and Cranium. But now maybe I have a chance to start over. I email Trotsky and congratulate him on the new job. I tell him how excited I am to be working for him. Trotsky lives in the suburbs, a couple towns away from me. He won’t start working at HubSpot for a few more weeks, but I ask him if he wants to have dinner before then, because I can’t wait to start brainstorming.
A week or so later we meet at a pub in Winchester. Much to my relief, we hit it off. Trotsky is in his early forties, with curly dark hair, a bushy lumberjack beard, and big weightlifter arms, both of them covered in full-sleeve tattoos, like a carny. He tells me that he used to box, and he has a dog—a Doberman. He’s married and has a young kid. Like me, he once considered moving to Silicon Valley, but he chose to stay in Boston, because he thinks his family is happier here.
Trotsky has been around the industry for a while, and it turns out we have some mutual friends. He started his career in PR agencies and bounced through five shops in six years. Then he started working at software companies, hoping to hit it big on an IPO. So far he has struck out. At one company, Eloqua, he bailed out just after the company went public and just before it got acquired, in a deal that would have made him rich. His next employer, the place he’s just leaving, is a tiny start-up in Boston that is fizzling out.
Now he’s coming to HubSpot, and although he’s arriving late to the party, he has taken a small salary and loaded up on stock options. He doesn’t need to be super rich. He just wants to make enough money to pay off his mortgage, buy a vacation house, and “put enough money in the bank that I just don’t have to take shit from anyone,” he says.
Trotsky is a wildcatter. Hire him, and he’ll work your oil field and see if he can strike it rich. If he doesn’t, he’ll move on. Silicon Valley is filled with people like this who spend their careers jumping from one tiny dysfunctional company to another, chasing a pot of gold. “I was stunned when I was doing recruiting in the Valley,” a former software executive recalls. “Everyone is a mercenary. Every resume you’d look at had all these stints of a year here, a year there. Like if they didn’t hit the jackpot in a year, they’d go place a new bet.”
I think of this as a kind of mental disorder—the Start-up Disease. I know the symptoms, because I am suffering from them myself. But Trotsky has an even more severe case, and he’s been afflicted for a lot longer. Trotsky says the clock is ticking down on him and his career. He’s already too old to be working in tech. If he doesn’t strike it rich at HubSpot he’ll get one more chance, maybe two. By then he will be fifty, and nobody will hire him.
He tells me that his first impression of HubSpot is that it reminds him of Logan’s Run, the dystopian sci-fi movie where people are killed when they reach the age of thirty, in order to prevent overpopulation. Even Trotsky has never worked in a place that is so exaggeratedly young. He tells me how Penny, the receptionist, who is twenty-three but looks seventeen, told him when she first met him, “I think it’s cool that they’re starting to hire some older people now.” Trotsky was startled both by the sentiment and by her lack of tact. Bemused, he asked Penny what age she considers old. Where is the cutoff between young people and old people? “I guess about thirty,” she said.
I tell Trotsky that if he thinks HubSpot feels weird to him, imagine working there at my age. A few months ago I turned fifty-three. When I was fifty-two I could almost deal with HubSpot, because the average employee is twenty-six, and so I was exactly double the average. Now I’m more than twice the average, and somehow this feels worse. “It seems like a line you don’t want to cross,” I say.
I tell him about Zack and his crazy memos in ALL CAPS about CONQUERING THE WORLD. I kvetch about Cranium’s latest management innovation, a service called TINYpulse that bombards us with weekly happiness surveys. TINYpulse also has a feature called Cheers for Peers that lets people send out little praise-gasms for their coworkers. You praise me, I praise you, and we all get happy by reminding each other how awesome we are. Our super cheery cheerleaders are wearing this feature out with overuse, sending cheers for everything. Spinner, the former volleyball team captain, has a special place in her heart for Ashley, the youngest member of the blog team. “Ashley for president!” is one of her favorite lines. When Ashley fills in for Jan and runs the blog for a few days, Spinner praises Ashley for being “calm and collective.”
Sadly, I have not received any cheers from peers. The women on the blog team have pretty much stopped speaking to me. They also won’t acknowledge that my little sub-blog has been generating a lot of traffic. In terms of page views, the five biggest posts over the past ninety days have been from me. One of my articles generated 190,000 views in a single day. In the entire seven-year history of the company only two posts have ever generated more page views than that, and it took months for them to hit the number that my post hit in twenty-four hours. On the other hand, my stuff still isn’t converting well. I’m getting lots of traffic, but my readers aren’t clicking on the e-book offers or filling out forms.
Nonetheless, Cranium notices the spike in traffic, and one week, at our marketing department meeting, he awards me the Golden Unicorn, a prize for being that week’s outstanding marketer. This is an actual tiny statue of a unicorn, in gold. I put it on my desk and take pictures of it. Maybe this is good! Maybe I’m learning how to do this marketing stuff after all.
I’m still working in the boiler room, away from the other bloggers. From Marcia and Jan I hear not a peep. There are no little “You go girl!!!” emails being passed around the department for me. The women who run our email campaigns and social media feeds won’t promote my articles to their subscribers. Michael, the copyeditor who just got hired to work on the marketing blog, is not allowed to work on my posts; Marcia and Jan say they can’t spare him.
Things are going to change, Trotsky assures me. He tells me that one of the biggest reasons he took the job was because he wanted to work with me. I don’t believe this for a second, but all those years of working in PR have taught Trotsky how to deal with journalists: A little bit of flattery goes a long way.
“They’re wasting your talent,” he says. “You should be doing more than just banging out blog posts. I have some ideas for you. I think you should be doing much higher-profile stuff.”
I leave dinner with Trotsky feeling cautiously hopeful. Maybe things really are taking a turn for the better. Maybe I’ll do some work that I actually enjoy. Maybe, when April arrives, I won’t want to leave.
But soon enough, that changes. Ten days after my dinner with Trotsky, before he even arrives for his first day at work, I manage to shoot myself in the foot, and this time I do it in a very big, public way.
Fifteen
Grandpa Buzz
In the first week of December Spinner sends around an email informing us that Halligan has been written up in an awesome new story in the New York Times. She wants us all to promote the article on our social feeds and drive some traffic to it. Spinner told me a few months ago that a Times journalist, Adam Bryant, had asked to interview Halligan for a feature called Corner Office. That column i
s usually a puff piece where a CEO gets asked some softball questions, but Spinner was nervous about it, because, as she put it, Halligan has a tendency to stick his foot in his mouth and say stupid things when he gets in front of a reporter.
I offered to help Halligan prepare by conducting practice interviews with him. I’ve interviewed thousands of people, and the ones who do best are the ones who practice. Bryant wouldn’t ask any tough questions, but Halligan should have two or three points he wanted to make and not wander off them. Tech companies often pay journalists to act as media training consultants and help their executives learn to do interviews, but HubSpot already had me working in house, so why not take advantage of this?
I also offered to go to New York with Halligan and Spinner when he was doing the interview. I know Adam Bryant, and I figured it couldn’t hurt for Halligan to have a friendly connection tagging along. Spinner did not want my help. Perhaps she saw the interview as a feather in her cap and didn’t want to share the credit.
Spinner flew solo, Halligan got no media training, and now the article is out and Halligan, predictably, has blown it. The main point of the Halligan article is that Halligan loves to take naps. “Brian Halligan, Chief of HubSpot, on the Value of Naps,” is the headline. Halligan thinks naps are so important that he installed a nap room with a hammock at HubSpot. So far so good. Taking naps is the kind of oddball thing that Corner Office is looking for.
That’s the angle that got Halligan in the door. Now he has a chance to tell people—and by people, I mean investors—what HubSpot does. Most people have never heard of HubSpot. Even people who have heard of HubSpot sometimes think it is a marketing agency or a consulting firm.
Halligan should have a very simple brief: HubSpot is a cloud software company, selling marketing automation software and run by people from MIT. HubSpot is a leading player in a very hot market space, and the company is growing like crazy. That’s it. That’s all he needs to do. Talk about naps and plug the company.
But during the interview Halligan starts rambling and talking about how HubSpot likes to hire really young people. Maybe he sees the interview as a recruiting opportunity, a way to reach Millennials. If so, he’s wrong. The Times media kit says the median age of a Times subscriber is fifty. According to the Pew Research Center, people under thirty make up only one-third of the paper’s audience. The college kids Halligan wants to hire get their news on Facebook and BuzzFeed. That’s where you go to talk about your fun-loving, youth-oriented culture.
Halligan tells the Times that HubSpot is trying to “build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y’ers.” Yikes. I understand what he is trying to say, but he is getting a bit too close to saying that he would rather hire young people than old people, which is something you definitely don’t want to say in public, even if it’s true.
Still, if he leaves things there, he might be okay. I read on. Next, Halligan explains that young people make better employees, especially in the technology industry, where everything is changing so fast that older people just can’t keep up.
Then comes the money quote: “In the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated.”
Only an imbecile would say this. Halligan is essentially admitting that Hubspot discriminates on the basis of age. Age discrimination has become a huge issue in Silicon Valley. Halligan is not the only tech CEO who prefers to hire young people; he’s just the only one dumb enough to admit it. Halligan has not just put his foot in his mouth—he has taken his foot out of his mouth and stepped on a land mine.
I don’t know if Adam Bryant included these comments on purpose, knowing how incendiary they might be. Surely Halligan talked about all sorts of things in the interview, and Bryant cherry-picked which comments to publish. That’s why doing an interview is always risky. That’s also why CEOs need media training.
For me, Halligan’s comments strike a nerve. Here I am, a guy in my fifties, with lots of gray hair and experience, and I’m being treated like shit by the twenty-something people at Halligan’s company. Halligan is giving them his blessing.
I start to post a link to the article on Facebook, along with a wise-ass comment. But then I think better of it and delete what I’ve written without publishing it. I go do something else. But it bugs me. I go back to Facebook and write another post, taking a different approach. It’s still not right. I want something that’s funny but has a little bite. I go downstairs and make a cup of coffee. Standing in the kitchen, I think of a post that makes me laugh out loud. I go to Facebook and write out the comment. For a while I sit there looking at it. I think about what will happen if I press POST. The smart move is to delete the comment, shut off my computer, and go for a walk. Take a hike in the woods and shout into the trees. Grumble about this privately but don’t say anything in public. That’s the smart play.
Instead I say to hell with it and post the comment. I include a link to the Times story, beneath this comment:
“In the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated,” says THE CEO OF THE COMPANY WHERE I FUCKING WORK. “We’re trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y’ers.” I feel so special.
This isn’t such a big deal. It’s the kind of snarky little remark that I made on the Fake Steve blog all the time. But I have no illusions about how it will be received at HubSpot. Cults are not usually filled with people who can take a joke.
Then again, why should I care? These people have made it pretty clear that they don’t want me around. Here is the CEO saying pretty much the same thing, in a newspaper. I figure I’m done at HubSpot, but I’m okay with that.
Compared to most people, I have a fairly big audience on Facebook, with more than one hundred thousand people following my posts. Within minutes the comments start pouring in, with people complaining about age discrimination in tech. Some are my friends, but many are people I don’t know. My post is being shared, going viral and spreading around the world. A guy from France says in his country, “this would be called discrimination. And lead the CEO to serious trouble.” Someone writes an article criticizing Halligan and posts a link to the article in the comments under my post.
My post is blowing up partly because people enjoy seeing the crazy Fake Steve Jobs blogger guy making fun of his boss in public. “Did you get fired today?” one asks.
But I’ve also tapped into a huge well of anger that I didn’t know existed. Apparently, a lot of people have been pushed aside after reaching a certain age, especially in the tech industry. The things Halligan said out loud are exactly what those people suspect their bosses were thinking about them when they shoved them out the door. Officially nobody ever gets fired because of age. Officially, their position no longer exists, or the department is changing priorities. But everyone knows the truth. They’re old, and they get paid too much. As my editor at Newsweek told me, “They can take your salary and hire five kids right out of college.” Now here is some asshole tech CEO who has just blurted that out, in an interview.
On Facebook, Spinner chimes in. She writes an angry comment under my Facebook post telling me I am not a team player: “We’re all supposed to be solving for EV,” she writes. EV means enterprise value, and “solving for EV” means we’re all supposed to be doing whatever we can to pump up the value of the company. Then Cranium jumps into the fray. Instead of apologizing for Halligan he doubles down and defends the remarks. “I give Brian credit for being transparent and upfront,” Cranium writes. “A lot of CEOs are hard to read and borderline deceptive. With Brian you know what he is thinking and I think that is awesome.”
Yup, it’s awesome all right. Now people really start piling in. It’s a feeding frenzy of angry olds on a Facebook rampage. A fifty-something former marketing executive at IBM dismisses Cranium as a buffoon and a bootlicker, and says HubSpot’s board should be meeting right away to replace Halligan: “A CEO who insults potential clients, employees & shareholders in the NYT. You’re a marketing company? Your VCs should be
recruiting by tomorrow.”
The post gets hundreds of likes, dozens of shares, nearly one hundred comments. I can’t stop the onslaught. I consider deleting my post, which would also delete all the comments, but that would create the impression that HubSpot forced me to take it down, which could make the company look worse. Besides that, what Halligan said was stupid, and I don’t feel sorry for pointing that out.
I leave the post up, and wait for someone at HubSpot to call me to tell me I’m fired. But the phone doesn’t ring.
My friends are taking a sadistic pleasure in watching me crash and burn. One, who works in PR, says I should start coloring my hair. “Show up tomorrow as a redhead,” she recommends. Another, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, suggests I need to change my Facebook photo to something that makes me look younger. I scan an old photo from my First Communion and make it my profile photo. There I am, age eight, wearing my First Communion robe, hands folded in prayer in front of me, looking angelic. “I’m trying to get a promotion at HubSpot,” I write. “The 8-year-old version of me has lots of ideas about how to expand geographically while also driving up MRR by pushing into the enterprise.” My friend the former Journal reporter says the twelve-year-olds at HubSpot better watch out for that old guy with the gray hair. “You misunderstand HubSpot,” I tell him. “The twelve-year-olds are running the place and they know best.”
This is pure hara-kiri, ritual seppuku. But I figure there is no way to salvage the situation, and if I’m going to go out I should at least do it in style.
Some of my HubSpot colleagues seemed genuinely baffled by my complaint. One of them—white, male, in his twenties—sends me an email asking why I’m so angry. I tell him that in retrospect I am not so much angry as I am disappointed and even amused. Halligan has made a classic Kinsley gaffe, named after the journalist Michael Kinsley, who defined gaffes as those moments when politicians slip up and reveal what they truly believe: “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.”