Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble Hardcover – April 5, 2016 by Dan Lyons ,Hachette Group Books

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble Hardcover – April 5, 2016 by Dan Lyons ,Hachette Group Books

Disrupted not only wildly entertains; it also sheds light on some troubling issues in the startup and tech cultures.

Entertainment: Disrupted caused me to laugh out loud more often than any other book has ever caused me to laugh out loud. Would you expect less from a writer for the TV show Silicon Valley? Reading Disrupted is like binge-watching SV, only this company is a REAL place, which makes it even better.

Important social issues: Disrupted also raises a couple of troubling issues that surely extend far beyond the culture of this one company. The first is what appears to be a false promise of meaningful work to young people who desperately want to be doing meaningful work, but who are really just making a couple of people very, very wealthy. There's a smoke-and-mirrors quality to the ways in which employees are recruited, trained, treated, and then "graduated" (Hubspot's term for "fired"). They're told that the work they'll be doing is changing the world (when really what they're doing is online advertising), that Hubspot is more selective than Harvard (when this is actually a severe distortion of the data), and so on. The perks used to attract employees include an 'awesome!!!' candy wall, shower pods, beer, nerf gun battles, etc. You quickly get the sense that the work is empty, meaningless, even soulless -- and that what it's really about is making a couple of guys very, very rich (which I would be okay with IF the work truly were meaningful and If the employees truly were being treated as individual humans, not as hypnotized sheep.)

Second, Dan is brave enough to bring up another important issue in startup culture: ageism. Older people are seen as having nothing to contribute. The age discrimination is actually shockingly overt. Imagine saying, "I want to run a company that really attracts people with blue eyes, because people with brown eyes just aren't creative." You'd (probably) never say something like that. But people who run this company openly say that about young people versus older people. I'm glad Dan is talking about it, because someone needed to start that conversation.