I can’t get Dan Lyons out of my head.
Lyons is the author of Disrupted, the buzzy new book about what happens when a curmudgeonly fifty-ish tech writer gets unceremoniously dumped from a plum role at Newsweek and takes a job as a “content generator” at Hubspot, a white-hot Boston startup selling marketing software.
Best known for creating a “Fake Steve Jobs” blog, and more recently for his work on the writing team for HBO’s achingly funny Silicon Valley, Lyons has a taste for the absurd, and his prologue (excerpt here)–describing his initial experience at Hubspot–is a laugh-out-loud takedown of tech startup culture.
The fun only lasts a few chapters, however (captured perfectly in this review by Erin Griffith), as Lyons hopes to convey a more serious point (conveniently summarized in an op-ed in today’s New York Times): that the excitement around technology companies is largely empty hype, enthusiasm used to sucker naïve young adults to work for peanuts (and candy), and to enrich savvy founders and venture capital investors, and the investment bankers who enable them, at the expense of the gullible mom and pop investors who buy shares of these fast-growing but often profitless companies after they go public.Continue reading…
