This week I’ve been mainly…

Reading the book Disrupted by Dan Lyons.

Being of a fifty-something myself and having had my own year in startup hell. (Well I didn’t even make the year until I was fired, nicely.) This book was wonderful read, made all the more poignant and realistic by the fact I have seen some of this behaviour first hand.The book is a story of a fifty-something Dan ending up in HubSpot and essentially being driven mad by the idiots working there who mostly have no experience whatsoever and there’s certainly no evidence of any management going on. Its a great read about incompetence, madness and the whole get-rich-quick schemes being set up by investors. The drive behind all this is to squeeze out the cash in a business that doesn’t make profit by doing an IPO. All you have to do is drive hype and growth and not necessarily create what I ( or many others) would call a functional business. These Unicorns being all the rage, Salesforce and Twitter being others with massive valuations but no real longevity in terms of profit making.

What was most interesting was the twenty-somethings with no experience, churning out crap and actually believing their own bullshit. I see this first hand here in Cambodia. Here you are an ‘expert’, back home you’re a nobody. Partially one of the reasons that people actually get in this position, is that businesses themselves are so inexperienced at recruiting, they will take anyone who knows a few buzzwords and of course they are desperate and overloaded themselves. Better a bum in a seat who can do something, rather than no one at all.

I’ve seen people having never run businesses teaching the locals how to set up a business. I’ve the most appalling behaviour towards others in (even more) junior roles that frankly begs the question about their mental stability, and anything of a professional and mentally stimulating and challenging nature simply doesn’t happen here.

In linking this to Hubspot where the conversation about the Candy wall being totally lost on the young recipient when compared to actually paying a decent wage, the separation from reality is as much absent here as it is there.

However in true fun style, I now search the sender details of every Hubspot e-mail I receive. The book is right, 2 years out of college, 3 years out of college, 5 years out of college. Not a single person I looked at while searching the rank and file of the staff list on LinkedIn has more than five years in a job, any job.

Now you could argue, I’m just jealous. All that cash generated by a company, hundreds of millions. The shareholders and investors making a pretty penny. At some point though, this structure of marketing over substance is going to get found out, with the I told you so’s coming thick and fast.

A great read on Amazon.
The post  Disrupted by Dan Lyons, first appeared on the blog of Chris Wray.