Disrupted: My Misadventure In The Start-Up Bubble Quotes
"To me, Newsweek is more than a company—it’s an institution. And being a magazine writer seems like the very best job in the world."
"I think they just want to hire younger people. They can take your salary and hire five kids right out of college."
"I tell her I understand. I’m a business reporter, after all. This is the stuff I write about."
"Our job isn’t to talk people out of buying. Our job is to make what people want."
"Nobody really knows what’s going to work, or which companies are going to succeed."
"The personal computer was still a relatively new thing. We were getting in on the ground floor of what would become a huge new market."
"The economics of these companies made no sense. Their valuations were completely irrational."
"I might always wonder how things would have turned out if I had just sucked up the courage to make the leap."
"HubSpot isn’t just about making money, there is a meaning and a purpose to what you do, that your company has a mission."
"Our job is to feed the ducks. And right now, the ducks are hungry."
"Every year there are fewer jobs in journalism. It’s a game of musical chairs, with a bunch of laid-off old hacks running around and fighting over the few remaining seats."
"As for me, I am completely transfixed. I’ve never seen or heard anything like this."
"Have you ever received a call from one of those annoying telemarketers and wondered what it must be like on his end of the phone?"
"The media business now needs to figure out a new way to produce journalism and make money from it, but so far nobody has any good ideas."
"The old tech industry was run by engineers and MBAs; the new tech industry is populated by young, amoral hustlers."
"The only ones who get hurt will be venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park."
"I’m working for the people who fill your email inbox with junk mail, the online equivalent of those pesky telemarketers."
"Experience is valuable, but I’m willing to accept the idea that experience can also be an impediment."
"The basic idea on all of these things is that you answer a zillion random questions, and a piece of software analyzes your answers to determine what kind of person you are."
"At HubSpot, the assessment program is overseen by Dave, the energetic goateed heavy-metal guitarist who runs the company training program."
"The big theory behind DISC is that if you know what kind of person you’re dealing with, you can understand how to interact with them."
"Try to imagine the calamity of that: Zack, age twenty-eight, with no management experience, gets training from Dave, a weekend rock guitarist, on how to apply a set of fundamentally unsound psychological principles as a way to manipulate the people who report to him."
"Promoting a new article by our company co-founder by blasting links onto dozens of social media feeds is the kind of thing that HubSpot’s marketing people do all the time."
"Here are grown men and women, who I presume are fully sentient adult human beings, and they are sitting in meetings, talking to a teddy bear."
"But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe after spending all those years in the news business I have become overly cynical."
"Zack changes his mind a lot. We’re heading south! No, we’re going north! We’re taking a plane! No, a train! No, bicycles!"
"One of his ploys to get attention involves publishing an article on Mashable, a technology news site, with the provocative headline 10 REASONS WHY I IGNORED YOUR RESUME."
"The company goes public and then they clean house. As soon as they register for an IPO, start looking for a new job."
"HubSpot is playing the game, saying the kind of ridiculous things that investors now expect to hear from start-ups."
"Jordan is twenty-eight years old, was hired in 2007, straight out of college, and now manages a dozen direct reports."
"The spider monkeys are paid $35,000 a year to smile and dial, with a bonus based on performance."
"Halligan’s personal goal, he tells us, is to have more money than anyone else who worked at PTC. He knows their net worth, and he’s determined to beat them."
"In the afternoon the company brings in food and beer, and work grinds to a halt."
"People are constantly being hired and fired, or 'graduated,' as Cranium says in his emails to the group."
"I remind myself that I have a lot to be thankful for—realizing, even as I do, that the only people who say this are people who are desperate and miserable."
"In the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated."
"I tell my board as little as possible. 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."
"You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore. It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big."
"Our most important assets walk out the door every night."
"No wonder these zombies need to take a week off in San Francisco once a year, with some Deepak Chopra and maybe an eight ball of coke and a Canadian hooker to make the whole thing seem worthwhile."
"We’re a team, not a family. Just like a Major League Baseball player, on any day, without warning, you might get cut. But hey, enjoy that candy."
"They believe very strongly that they operate with high integrity. They believe they are the most moral folks on the planet. But they are not."
"The real story is about two founders and a handful of investors who are about to extract more than $1 billion from the public markets, and how they pulled it off."
"The game is about maximizing profit in a short period of time and then moving to something else when the first thing fizzles out."
"By the time you get to the IPO, I want to see people lined up around the block waiting to get into the theater on opening night."
"Compounding the problem is the fact that Silicon Valley now attracts a different kind of person—young, male, amoral."
"Give millions of dollars to young entitled assholes, provide no adult supervision, and what happens next is predictable."
"Presumably the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley know what will happen when they invest in young, inexperienced founders, and they simply don’t care."
"What’s great for VCs may not be so great for the rest of us."
"You can screw up again and again, and make one mistake after another... as long as you’re (a) enthusiastic and (b) loyal."
"I’m never going to be content marketer of the year."
"Some, like Uber and Airbnb, have built their businesses by defying regulations."
"Stock market manias are heaven for venture capitalists."
"Why have I still not put the word HubSpot back into my profiles there?"
"Never in my life have I had someone turn on me so completely."
"It’s a very simple situation. If the podcast succeeds, you keep your job."
"Left unspoken is how we will define success."
"Why haven’t I scheduled meetings with a dozen different people across the marketing department to get them on board with the podcast?"
"We’re marketing people. We need to do marketing!"
"I imagine that I am studying the way a corporate department goes about getting rid of an unwanted employee, using myself as the subject of the experiment."
"I start to hate myself for being such a coward, for being afraid to stand up for myself."
"I’ve been crazy busy. Hope you had great holidays and will enjoy 2015!"