New Reads - Part 4
The last book I've read over the Christmas period has been out a couple of years, but I've finally got around to reading; Disrupted: Ludicrous Misadventures in the Tech Start-up Bubble by Dan Lyons is a fascinating, enjoyable, eye-opening and scary read.
It's worth reading for those thinking of working in the larger US tech companies such as Google, Facebook or even Hubspot itself, to gain insight into the mindset of these founders and the cult-like operations they cultivate.
Some quotes:
"At Newsweek I worked for Jon Meacham, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson. Here I work for a guy who brings a teddy bear to work and considers it a management innovation."
"This is the New Work, but really it is just a new twist on an old story, the one about labor being exploited by capital. The difference is that this time the exploitation is done with a big smiley face."
"Before my time, Cranium created a weekly video podcast called HubSpot TV, starring himself and a co-host. The show streamed live, every Friday afternoon. I can’t imagine many people outside HubSpot actually watched it. Cranium didn’t care! He and his co-host kept doing the podcast for four years and recorded 225 episodes. Those videos still exist online someplace. They are like a real-life version of the comedy done by Ricky Gervais in the British version of The Office, where the goal is not so much to make you laugh as to make you feel uncomfortable. You wish it would stop, but you can’t look away."
"Online marketing is not quite as sleazy as Internet porn, but it’s not much better, either."
"The old W. C. Fields line “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit” seems like the motto not just for Chopra but for the entire conference."
"Board members don’t always know everything about a company, he says. They only know what the management team tells them, and sometimes that is not too much. “I tell my board as little as possible,” he says. “I treat them like mushrooms, I keep them in the dark and feed them shit. I don’t want them meddling in my business and telling me what to do.”"
"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."
The book is available on Amazon here.