Disrupted

by Dan Lyons

  Halligan really believes that the best way to build a tech company is to hire hundreds of young, inexperienced people, give them lots of free beer and parties, and turn them loose. He’s entitled to his opinion. He may even be right. That doesn’t make it smart for him to say it in public.

  I ask my young, white, male colleague to imagine that instead of saying that older people (gray hair and experience) are overrated, Halligan said that gay people are overrated, or women, or African-Americans, or Jews. Imagine Halligan saying, “We’re trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain white people, because when it comes to technology, white people do a much better job than black people.”

  “But he didn’t say that!” my colleague responds. “He didn’t say anything about gays, or women, or black people!”

  As the Bible says: Jesus wept.

  In a way I almost feel relieved. I’m sick of HubSpot. I’m tired of trying to fit in. Now at least it’s over. It’s early December. I can enjoy the holidays and then in January start looking for a new job.

  But as the day wears on and the Facebook frenzy runs out of steam, I still never get a call or an email from HubSpot. There’s no word from Wingman or Cranium, nothing from Halligan or anyone in HR. The next day is a Friday, and again I stay home, and again I get no word from anyone.

  Over the weekend it dawns on me that they are not going to fire me—because they can’t fire me.

  No doubt they want to fire me. But how does that play out? The CEO of a company makes remarks in a newspaper that sound like he and his company discriminate on the basis of age. An older employee criticizes the CEO’s comments, and then gets fired for expressing his opinion.

  What happens next? Maybe the older employee makes a big stink in public. Maybe the old guy sues the company. Maybe the judge who presides over the case has gray hair, too. My knowledge of the law is based entirely on what I’ve learned by watching Law & Order, but my sense is that this gray-haired plaintiff might have a case.

  Even if he doesn’t, the company risks unleashing a shitstorm of bad publicity just as it’s trying to go public.

  They’re not going to fire me. They can’t, and they know it.

  The great irony is that posting that obnoxious comment has actually made me invulnerable. How can they ever fire me, without it looking as if they are punishing me for making those comments?

  “I can do anything I want,” I tell Sasha, who is clearly worried. “I could go into the office on Monday and climb up on Halligan’s desk, pull down my pants, and take a dump on the keyboard of his MacBook Air, and they still couldn’t fire me.”

  “Strictly speaking,” Sasha says, “I think that’s not true.”

  Of course she’s right. Dropping anchor anywhere in the office other than a toilet in the men’s room will definitely get me fired, not to mention arrested and sent for a psychiatric evaluation. Which is as it should be.

  “I am not saying that I intend to engage in any inappropriate loaf-pinching behavior at the office,” I tell her.

  She looks at me.

  “Or here at home,” I say.

  “Thank you.”

  So that’s the good news—they can’t fire me. The bad news is that they can do what companies often do when there’s someone they want to get rid of—which is they can abuse me and make my life a living hell, so that I’ll leave on my own.

  They won’t do this right away. They will have to be clever about it. There’s an art to making an employee miserable. But that is exactly the treatment that is hurtling toward me. I’m just too stupid to see it.

  I’m not sure if my age has anything to do with how poorly I’ve been treated at HubSpot. Certainly it makes me stand out, and certainly it is something I have become aware of, something that I think about, constantly. This is new to me. Previously I’ve worked with people of all ages, and I’ve never thought about their age, or mine. At HubSpot I’m constantly self-conscious. I feel ancient. At one point I notice that one of the top executives, a guy in his late forties, is coloring his hair. I wonder if I should start coloring mine. As a half measure, I buy a conditioner that supposedly will darken the parts of my hair that aren’t gray, and make me look less gray overall. It doesn’t work, and it makes me hate myself even more than I usually do, so I stop using it.

  As far as I can tell there is only one HubSpot employee who is older than I am. His name is Max, and he’s in his sixties. He once owned a company and had set aside enough money to retire. But he got wiped out in the first dotcom crash back in 2001. He never expected to be working at this point in his life, but here he is, teaching small-business owners about inbound marketing. Max and I sometimes go to lunch together in the mall food court. We trade stories about being strangers in a strange land, two gray-haired old dudes surrounded by people half our age and aware that those people do not hold us in high regard. We kvetch about the many humiliations, big and small, that are inflicted upon us. At some point I realize what Max and I must look like to the HubSpotters who see us sitting together in the food court: To them we must resemble those elderly dipshits I see sitting in Dunkin’ Donuts wearing VFW windbreakers and bitching about these kids these days. I decide that Max and I should cut back on our lunches, or maybe meet on days when we’re working at home and can have lunch out in the suburbs, where nobody from HubSpot will see us.

  One of the maddening things about discrimination of any kind is that it is often difficult, if not impossible, to prove that it’s taking place. The bias is often subtle, or even subconscious. People at HubSpot rarely talk about age bias, and when they do, they’re not talking about older workers being treated poorly. They’re talking about how unfair it is that people in their early twenties are not given enough responsibility, just because they’re young.

  But at work people make frequent references to my age. They speak euphemistically about my experience, wink-wink. I am asked whether I know how to use Facebook.

  Penny, the receptionist, tells me she wants to get off the reception desk and do something else, but she doesn’t know what. What do I think? I suggest a few roles—PR, HR, recruiting—but she doesn’t like those.

  “What else?” she asks.

  I tell her I don’t know.

  “Well what’s the point of having an old guy friend if you’re not going to give me any ideas?” she says.

  Spinner at one point comes up with an idea to get some publicity. “We should pitch a story about you working here at HubSpot, and how you’re learning a whole new thing,” she says. “We can call it ‘Old Dog, New Tricks.’”

  I look at her as if to say, You must be kidding. She tries to backpedal, saying she didn’t mean it as an insult. She thinks it’s really cool that I’ve joined this company with such a young culture and I’ve done such an awesome job of fitting in.

  I want to believe she means well. I tell her I’ll think about it.

  One day the women on the blog team spot an article by an “old guy” (Mark Duffy, age fifty-three) who works at BuzzFeed. WHAT IT’S LIKE BEING THE OLDEST BUZZFEED EMPLOYEE is the headline. Duffy depicts himself as a clueless doofus and illustrates the article with pictures of Benjamin Button, Grampa Simpson, and the crazy bald senior citizen from the Six Flags commercials, the one who wears a tuxedo and giant eyeglasses and dances around like a halfwit.

  The blog women think this BuzzFeed article is hilarious.

  “Dan, you should write something like that for us,” Jan says.

  “Yeah!” Ashley says. “Like, ‘What It’s Like Being the Token Old Guy at HubSpot.’ You’d be totes awesome at that!”

  “I hope you die a hundred pounds overweight, surrounded by cats that feast on your corpse”—is not what I say.

  What I do say is, “Wow, cool idea. That’s something to think about.”

  I smile. I laugh along with the joke. I’m old! I’m so goddamn old! I should totally write something funny about what it’s like to be this old!

  At one point I’m working on a pr
oject in the brand and buzz department, and one of the twenty-something bros coins a new nickname for me: “I’m going to call you Grandpa Buzz,” he says. Everyone laughs. I laugh too, because why not? Grandpa Buzz! It’s hilarious! Jimmy, the bro who made up the nickname, doesn’t know what I did before coming to HubSpot, and even if he did he would not care. He has probably heard of Newsweek, but I doubt he has ever read it. It means nothing to him. He’s a recent graduate of the New Hampshire state college system, and though he works in media production, he has never heard of the Drudge Report, and when I refer to George Martin as the “fifth Beatle,” Jimmy says, “Oh, is he the one who joined after McCartney died?” Sigh.

  Maybe I sound thin-skinned. It’s just a few wisecracks, after all. These are not bad people. For the most part they’re not trying to be mean about my age. It probably never occurs to them that any of this is hurtful to me.

  Of course I’m not going to mention any of this to the HR department. It would only make me seem nuts and paranoid and, worst of all, old, which is the last thing I want to be. This is no doubt why older workers tend not to complain about age discrimination. Who wants to sound like a whiner? My guess is the same applies to people who feel discriminated against based on race and gender. How do you prove that you didn’t get that promotion because you’re female, or black? And once you’ve complained, you’re branded a troublemaker.

  Yet I know what I feel. I know that when I look around, there are not many people like me. Sure, I’m not being picked on or actively persecuted. And these tiny slights and offhand remarks are not very significant when taken in isolation. But when you put them together they add up to… something.

  The biggest effect of being older than everyone else is simply that it keeps me from being able to fit in. At tech companies like HubSpot, fitting in is not just something that’s nice to do—it’s essential to your success. It is perhaps the most important thing. Start-up people talk a lot about the importance of “culture fit.” Wingman brought this up during our very first meeting, over lunch at the Thai restaurant, where he told me that he tries to hire people that he would like to meet for beers after work. In tech, the concept of culture fit is presented as a good thing. Unfortunately what culture fit often means is that young white guys like to hire other young white guys, and what you end up with is an astonishing lack of diversity.

  HubSpot’s problem isn’t just about age. The company also has issues regarding gender and ethnicity. There are plenty of female employees, but the company’s top ranks are stacked with men, almost all of them white. The sixteen-member management team includes two women. Of the eight directors, two are women, and aside from Dharmesh, everyone is white.

  Across the ranks of ordinary employees, as far as I can see there are zero black people. The first time I go to an all-hands company meeting I’m taken aback: It’s an ocean of white people, all of them young. It’s not just that everyone is white, but that they’re all the same kind of white. Klan rallies probably comprise a broader swath of the Caucasian population. It’s like stumbling into some weird eugenics lab, where people get hatched from pods, already dressed in J.Crew, Banana Republic, and North Face. The women have the same shoulder-length haircut, and when it rains they all show up in knee-high Hunter boots. The guys are former jocks and frat bros, with buzz cuts, salmon-colored shorts, backward baseball caps, and boat shoes. It’s like a reunion of the Greek system from some small college in New England. It’s like Cape Cod has barfed up all of its summer inhabitants under the age of thirty, and they’ve landed in the same building in Kendall Square, still wearing their Black Dog Tavern T-shirts.

  From what I can tell, HubSpot employs a handful of fifty-something people, a slightly larger number of people in their forties, a few dozen people in their thirties, and then that huge army of twenty-somethings. Later I will be told by a fellow HubSpot alumnus, a guy in his late thirties, that when he left HubSpot the company had seven hundred employees, only seventy-five of whom were over the age of thirty-five.

  “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg once said, when he was twenty-two years old. No doubt after that someone coached him not to say things like that anymore. But it hasn’t changed his hiring preferences. In 2013, the average Facebook employee was twenty-eight years old, according to PayScale. Out of thirty-two tech companies surveyed by PayScale, eight had a median age under thirty and only six had a median age above thirty-five, the New York Times reported, in an article headlined, TECHNOLOGY WORKERS ARE YOUNG (REALLY YOUNG).

  “Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America,” Noam Scheiber proclaimed in a March 2014 article in the New Republic, aptly titled THE BRUTAL AGEISM OF TECH. The article introduces a San Francisco cosmetic surgeon who claims to be “the world’s second biggest dispenser of Botox,” and describes the plight of forty-year-old men who desperately seek out cosmetic surgery so they can hang on to their jobs. WE WANT PEOPLE WHO HAVE THEIR BEST WORK AHEAD OF THEM, NOT BEHIND THEM, reads a technology job advertisement Scheiber cites.

  The tech industry’s ageism is blatant and unapologetic. It’s wrapped up in the mythology that has sprung up around start-ups. Almost by definition these companies are founded and run by young people. Young people are the ones who change the world. They’re filled with passion. They have new ideas. Venture capitalists openly admit they prefer to invest in twenty-something founders. “The cut-off in investors’ heads is thirty-two,” Paul Graham, who runs an incubator called Y Combinator, once said, adding that, “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg.” John Doerr, a legendary venture capitalist and partner at Kleiner Perkins, once said he liked to invest in “white male nerds who have dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they have absolutely no social life. When I see that pattern coming in, it [is] very easy to decide to invest.”

  Companies prefer the same thing. Forget about getting booted out when you turn fifty. In Silicon Valley that happens when you turn forty. Jennifer Young, a single mother, sued her former employer, a tech company called Zillow, for age discrimination, at the ripe old age of forty-one.

  In her complaint, Young says Zillow maintained a “frat house” culture with binge drinking and lewd behavior, and that she endured harassment by her younger male colleagues, who made snide comments, such as “Younger people are faster,” “Are you too old to close?” “Do you even know how to work a computer?” and “You can’t keep up with the rest of us.” According to her complaint, Young had a successful career in sales and was “lured to Zillow with the promise that Zillow had an exceptional workplace.” Once she was there, “It was commonplace at the Zillow office for managers to inform employees, including Ms. Young, that if you do not ‘drink the Zillow kool-aid’ there would be no opportunity for career advancement,” Young’s complaint reads.

  Young claims Zillow runs a high-pressure sales operation that sounds a bit like the boiler room at HubSpot. At one point the stress of her job caused an old back injury to flare up. She claimed that while she was in the hospital, Zillow fired her for “job abandonment.”

  Another Zillow employee, Rachel Kremer, sued Zillow complaining of “sexual torture” in an “adult frat house” and said the company had “a pervasive culture of degrading women.” Kremer says she received harassing text messages, like this: “Call me. Matt is showering. Thinking 333 dinner drinks and your smooth vagina.” In another exchange, Kremer asks a coworker, “Wanna go join a gym and work out tonight?” His response: “Wanna blow me and have sex tonight?” No thanks, she tells him.

  The lawyer who filed Kremer’s discrimination lawsuit says the harassment was the result of the male employees “being brainwashed by this corporate culture.” That culture, the attorney says, was basically the culture of a frat house. Zillow’s CEO, Spencer Rascoff, is a thirty-something former Goldman Sachs investment banker. The company’s nine-member management team includes seven white men and two white women. Its board of directors comprises ten white
guys. If you think that a frat house serves a good model for how to run a company, consider that Zillow went public in 2011, posted modest profits in 2011 and 2012, then reported losses in 2013, 2014, and the first nine months of 2015. Despite that, Zillow’s market valuation is about $4 billion, and its founders and investors and CEO have made a fortune.

  Grow fast, lose money, go public, get rich. That’s the model.

  I understand why venture capitalists like to invest in young founders. Building a company is hard work, and you’re trying to do this as cheaply as possible. Also, inexperienced founders sometimes can be tricked into agreeing to terms that are advantageous to investors. Stories of such VC trickery abound. Another reason to fund young people is that a lot of new tech companies are not really about technology. They are doing social media, or games, and that business is a lot like the entertainment business. If you were running a record label, would you invest in a new rapper who is fifty-five years old? Would you make a movie about a sixty-year-old superhero?

  The entertainment business is built around pop stars who get hot for two years and then disappear, and TV shows that run for five seasons. The game is about maximizing profit in a short period of time and then moving to something else when the first thing fizzles out. The same now goes for tech investors. “We’re in the hits business,” Chris Dixon, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has said.

  “Making the movie” is the term that a venture capitalist friend applies to the process of building a start-up. In my friend’s tech-company-as-movie analogy, the VCs are the producers and the CEO is the leading man. If possible, you try to get a star who looks like Mark Zuckerberg—young, preferably a college dropout, with maybe a touch of Asperger’s. You write a script—the “corporate narrative.” You have the origin myth, the eureka moment, and the hero’s journey, with obstacles to overcome, dragons to slay, markets to disrupt and transform. You invest millions to build the company—like shooting the movie—and then millions more to promote it and acquire customers.