‘Disrupted,’ by Dan Lyons

DISRUPTED
My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
By Dan Lyons
258 pp. Hachette Books. $27.

Dan Lyons is the last journalist who should have been surprised when he became yet another casualty in the war on old-media workers. A longtime tech writer (he began writing for PC Week in the 1980s, before the field became sexy), he was the technology editor at Newsweek in 2012 when he was “unceremoniously dumped” (would “ceremoniously dumped” have been better?) and at the age of 52 became what a story about the recession in his own magazine the previous year called a “beached white male.” When Lyons started his job four years earlier, Newsweek employees were already being offered buyouts; how could he not have seen what was coming? But he is also the last journalist who should have been leveled by the blow, since he had already shown himself to be enviably resourceful: In 2006, while he was the technology reporter at Forbes, he started a wicked, at first anonymous blog called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, in which, writing as Fake Steve, he portrayed the real Jobs as a constellation of personality disorders and satirized everyone of note in Silicon Valley. He turned the blog into a novel and also got a TV deal out of it. And though the show was never produced, he developed some pretty sweet Hollywood connections — the superagent Ari Emanuel and Larry Charles, of “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fame.

“Disrupted” is born of Lyons’s attempt to cross over from covering tech to getting a piece of the action in the second, current Internet bubble. He lucks out to a degree that is enviable, not because of his payday (he never tells us his salary, and his stock-option payout isn’t grand), but because the company he ends up working for, HubSpot, a marketing-software firm in Cambridge, Mass., is tailor-made for someone like him to write about, not as Fake Steve but as Real Dan. HubSpot embodies everything that’s ridiculous about the culture of start-ups, and in the bargain it reinforces every paranoid worry Lyons has about his age: As he learned from the beached-white-male piece, “in the new economy, age 50 was the new 65.”

If I were not able to confirm the existence of HubSpot on the web, I might think Lyons had invented it. The place is, to use Lyons’s references, a hash of Orwellian doublespeak, the movie “Office Space” and Scientology. HubSpot blasts its customers with what normal people call spam but they call “lovable marketing content.” It wants to put its customers into a state of “delightion.” Employees are entitled to unlimited free food and unlimited vacation time. There’s a wall of candy. One of the founders of the company brings a teddy bear to meetings so that the idea of “the customer” they are determined to delight is less abstract. And then there’s the unnerving, unreal reality that HubSpot shares with a number of other Internet companies: Although it has a valuation of around $2 billion, it has never made a profit. Unfortunately, Lyons isn’t able to get beyond the obvious ridiculousnesses. The young people who work at HubSpot — they’re so horribly, horribly young — are indistinguishable aliens to Lyons, and incapable, he says, of appreciating irony or sarcasm, or him.

None of this will be new to anyone who read even a couple of pieces about the first Internet bubble. The Ping-Pong ­tables, the snacks, the beanbag chairs — it’s all very familiar. Lyons doesn’t get below the surface of the place, or get to know anyone; connection and insight don’t seem to be his strengths. It’s not all his fault: After being hired as a “marketing fellow,” he is essentially ignored, and has nothing useful to do, and no one listens to his ideas. Naturally, he hates HubSpot almost instantly, gets into power struggles with co-workers and posts trouble-courting comments on Facebook. The disrupted is now a disrupter. You can’t blame him for what seems to be a kind of termination wish — HubSpot is clearly a crazy-­making company. One of the founders promulgates a corporate “culture code” called Heart, an acronym of five deadening words: humble, effective, adaptable, remarkable, transparent. At the same time, when employees are fired it is said they are “graduated,” and their names are never mentioned again.

Lyons’s book derails about three-­quarters of the way through, as he becomes obsessed with the unpredictable behavior of one of his co-workers, a fellow he calls Trotsky, toward him. (Almost everyone in the book has been given a mildly clever pseudonym.) The reader can’t make sense of their relationship either, and soon stops caring enough to try. What carries the book through to the end are two twists: One is that Lyons is summoned to Hollywood again, to write for the HBO comedy “Silicon Valley,” for a few months (while he’s still at HubSpot); the other is that once Lyons leaves HubSpot and writes this book, the company’s chief marketing officer is caught trying to procure the manuscript before it’s published, and is fired for his enterprising efforts.

That is, of course, a gift to Lyons, but he disingenuously professes shock over the news: “Why would anyone go to such lengths to get hold of a memoir whose essential purpose was to entertain?” (Oh, perhaps because people don’t find it very entertaining to be depicted as charlatans.) Such faux naïveté is unbecoming in someone as savvy as Lyons is, and makes him seem, in the end, an unreliable narrator of his own story.