Disrupted, Dan Lyons
Disrupted, Dan Lyons
9 Rating(s)
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Disrupted
My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

Bestseller

Author: Dan Lyons

Narrator: Dan Lyons

Unabridged: 9 hr 17 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/05/2016


Synopsis

An instant New York Times bestseller, Dan Lyons' "hysterical" (Recode) memoir, hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "the best book about Silicon Valley," takes readers inside the maddening world of fad-chasing venture capitalists, sales bros, social climbers, and sociopaths at today's tech startups.

For twenty-five years Dan Lyons was a magazine writer at the top of his profession--until one Friday morning when he received a phone call: Poof. His job no longer existed. "I think they just want to hire younger people," his boss at Newsweek told him. Fifty years old and with a wife and two young kids, Dan was, in a word, screwed. Then an idea hit. Dan had long reported on Silicon Valley and the tech explosion. Why not join it? HubSpot, a Boston start-up, was flush with $100 million in venture capital. They offered Dan a pile of stock options for the vague role of "marketing fellow." What could go wrong?

HubSpotters were true believers: They were making the world a better place ... by selling email spam. The office vibe was frat house meets cult compound: The party began at four thirty on Friday and lasted well into the night; "shower pods" became hook-up dens; a push-up club met at noon in the lobby, while nearby, in the "content factory," Nerf gun fights raged. Groups went on "walking meetings," and Dan's absentee boss sent cryptic emails about employees who had "graduated" (read: been fired). In the middle of all this was Dan, exactly twice the age of the average HubSpot employee, and literally old enough to be the father of most of his co-workers, sitting at his desk on his bouncy-ball "chair."

About Dan Lyons

Dan Lyons is the author of Disrupted: My Adventures in the Startup Bubble, a New York Times bestselling memoir, and Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us. He was also a writer for the hit HBO comedy series Silicon Valley. As a journalist, he spent a decade covering Silicon Valley for Forbes, ran tech coverage at Newsweek, and contributed to Fortune, the New York Times, Wired, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Laura on April 10, 2016

Ugh. The cluelessness! The lack of awareness and growth on the part of the author was a hoot. And horrifying to read. It's a fish out of water tale. A journalist in his 50's gets fired and needs new employment, fast. His wife is unemployed. He has two young children. He begrudgingly takes a job at a......more

Goodreads review by Mark on April 08, 2016

This book gets five stars for its sheer importance. It is a long-overdue takedown of the worst aspects of Silicon Valley culture, employing time-tested weapons for challenging hegemonic wisdom: sarcasm, ridicule, and satire. No sacred cow goes unslaughtered, and the result is one of the funniest boo......more

Goodreads review by David on May 19, 2016

I get it. I’m an old guy working in high tech, but I’ve always been here and in Canada we’re at a slight remove from the unicorn madness infecting some other tech centres. I can understand Dan’s snark and I’ve seen evidence of ruthless backstabbing, hi-tech mean-girling, hare-brained revelations fro......more

Goodreads review by Philip on May 13, 2016

This was a fun read that anyone in the tech industry can relate to. One reason I knocked my rating down is the "aw, shucks" tone the author takes. He makes it sound like he found the job, worked there a few months, and then realized he would write a book about it. I call bullshit - he went in to the......more

Goodreads review by Alan on May 27, 2016

I was torn between a 1 star and a 5 star review. The 5 stars because I can't remember the last time I read a book that made me so angry. I was initially really excited to read this - like the author I am a 50+ guy who jumped into the much younger world of start-ups. I was curious about his thoughts......more


Quotes

New York Times bestseller
Wall Street Journal bestseller
San Francisco Chronicle bestseller

"Using his trademark wit and clear-eyed analysis, Dan Lyons has delivered a much-needed referendum on the current state of Silicon Valley. In wildly entertaining fashion, Disrupted explores the ways in which many technology companies have come to fool the public and themselves. Lyons has injected a dose of sanity into a world gone mad."—Ashlee Vance, New York Times-bestselling author of Elon Musk

"Dan 'Fake Steve' Lyons runs such a savage burn on his ex-employer, HubSpot, that the smoke can be seen clear across the country in Silicon Valley. Disrupted is fun, compulsively readable and just might tell us something important about the hypocrisy and cult-like fervor inside today's technology giants."—Brad Stone, New York Times-bestselling author of The Everything Store

"Dan Lyons goes deep inside a company that uses terms like 'world class marketing thought leaders' to show us how ridiculous, wasteful, and infantile tech start-ups like this can be. And best of all, Lyons does this with his trademark pejorative and hilarious tone."—Nick Bilton, New York Times technology columnist

"Troubling but funny ... [a] coolly observant book ... [with] a splendidly weird coda ... You couldn't have written a tastier ending, even for HBO."—Dwight Garner, New York Times

"Disrupted by Dan Lyons is the best book about Silicon Valley today.... Simultaneously hilarious and terrifying, Disrupted is an insider's look at a technology start-up from an outsider's perspective. Yet it's more than a chronicle of Lyons' tenure at one company, but a broader commentary on a business culture that often appears to be built on financial quicksand."—Los Angeles Times

"As the writer behind the satirical blog Fake Steve Jobs, [Lyons] could not have imagined a place so ripe for parody as HubSpot. Every detail of the hip office space, incompetent management, and delusional workforce described by Lyons in his hilarious and unsettling exposé is like something out of a scripted comedy (the author writes for HBO's Silicon Valley) ... An exacting, excoriating takedown of the current startup 'bubble' and the juvenile corporate culture it engenders."—Kirkus Reviews

"Scathingly funny .... Like the show 'Silicon Valley,' Disrupted nails the workings of spastic, hypocritical, delusional tech culture."—New York Post

"Laugh-out-loud funny."—Newsweek

"Read this book if you work or invest in tech and, in particular, tech startups. And not just for the tales of corporate intrigue, hypocrisy, and ridiculousness that have caused HubSpot and its allies to get so hot under their collective collar.... [Lyons] makes a strong case for how all of that young labor, when increasingly wrapped up into an over-arching 'corporate culture,' creates subtle age discrimination that these employees won't recognize for years to come. This not only is a real (albeit virtually ignored) issue at tech companies today, but is going to become a much larger one as digital natives continue to age."—Dan Primack, Fortune.com