Dan Lyons > Quotes

“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. Benioff and his philanthropy, the dry ice and fog machines, the concerts and comedians: None of this has anything to do with software or technology. It’s a show, created to entertain people, boost sales, and fluff a stock price.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“Any place with a founder who brings a teddy bear to meetings,” he writes, “is a step away from Jonestown.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“These are the bozos. They are graspers and self-promoters, shameless resume padders, people who describe themselves as “product marketing professionals,” “growth hackers,” “creative rockstar interns,” and “public speakers.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“Our brains are wired to deal with stress that is intense but brief, like escaping from a predator or fleeing from a burning building. We’re not wired to handle chronic, ongoing stress, even if it is relatively mild.”
― Dan Lyons, Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us

“The thing about bozos is that bozos don’t know that they’re bozos. Bozos think they’re the shit, which makes them really annoying but also incredibly entertaining, depending on your point of view. Shrinks call this the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after two researchers from Cornell University whose studies found that incompetent people fail to recognize their own lack of skill, grossly overestimate their abilities, and are unable to recognize talent in other people who actually are competent.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: Ludicrous Misadventures in the Tech Start-up Bubble

“Civilians is one term journalists use to describe non-journalists. Another is laypeople. Or normals.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“Grow fast, lose money, go public, get rich. That’s the model.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“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. If you put a room full of journalists into this situation they would immediately begin ripping on each other, taking the piss out of the instructors, asking intentionally stupid questions. If the boss wants us to waste half a day on Romper Room bullshit, we could at least have some fun. My HubSpot colleagues, however, seem to take the DISC personality assessment seriously. The”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“...they sell dollar bills for seventy-five cents and take credit for how fast they’re growing.”
― Dan Lyons, Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us

“You tell them that you’re doing this not because you want to save money on office space but because this is how their generation likes to work.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“There’s an adage in Silicon Valley that people who use online services are not the customers. We’re the product. As”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“We’ve lost our way” is how another manifesto author, Andrew Hunt, put it in a 2015 essay titled “The Failure of Agile.” Hunt tells me the word agile has become “meaningless at best,” having been hijacked by “scads of vocal agile zealots” who had no idea what they were talking about. Agile has split into various camps and methodologies, with names like Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). The worst flavor, Hunt tells me, is Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, which he and some other original manifesto authors jokingly call Shitty Agile for Enterprise. “It’s a disaster,” Hunt tells me. “I have a few consultant friends who are making big bucks cleaning up failed SAFe implementations.” SAFe is the hellspawn brainchild of a company called Scaled Agile Inc., a bunch of mad scientists whose approach consists of a nightmare world of rules and charts and configurations. SAFe itself comes in multiple configurations, which you can find on the Scaled Agile website. Each one is an abomination of corporate complexity and Rube Goldberg-esque interdependencies.”
― Dan Lyons, Lab Rats: Guardian's Best Non-Fiction, 2019

“Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with twenty other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult. It’s amazing, and hilarious. It’s everything I ever imagined might take place inside a tech company, only even better.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“The advertisement challenges potential candidates: “Think you can get HubSpot on the cover of Time magazine or featured on 60 Minutes?” Take it from someone who worked at Time’s primary competitor—the only way a company like HubSpot will ever merit that kind of coverage is if an employee brings in a bag of guns and shoots the place up.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“The thing about bozos is that bozos don't know that they're bozos. Bozos think they're the shit, which makes them really annoying but also incredibly entertaining, depending on your point of view.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“Maybe the best way to do something really innovative is to hire a bunch of young people who have no experience and therefore no preconceived notions about how to run a company.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“Reporters are trained to hate corporate jargon and to eliminate it, not to engage in it. We’re expected to be cynical and skeptical, not to be cheerleaders.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises start-ups. “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.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“The first principle of crisis communications is that if you have bad news to divulge, you do it quickly and completely. HubSpot”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“One day Spinner, the woman who runs PR tells me, “I like that idea, but I’m not sure that it’s one-plus-one-equals-three enough.” What does any of this nutty horseshit actually mean? I have no idea. I’m just amazed that hundreds of people can gobble up this malarkey and repeat it, with straight faces. I’m equally amazed by the high regard in which HubSpot people hold themselves. They use the word awesome incessantly, usually to describe themselves or each other. That’s awesome! You’re awesome! No, you’re awesome for saying that I’m awesome! They pepper their communication with exclamation points, often in clusters, like this!!! They are constantly sending around emails praising someone who is totally crushing it and doing something awesome and being a total team player!!! These emails are cc’d to everyone in the department. The protocol seems to be for every recipient to issue his or her own reply-to-all email joining in on the cheer, writing things like “You go, girl!!” and “Go, HubSpot, go!!!!” and “Ashley for president!!!” Every day my inbox fills up with these little orgasmic spasms of praise. At first I ignore them, but then I feel like a grump and decide I should join in the fun. I start writing things like, “Jan is the best!!! Her can-do attitude and big smile cheer me up every morning!!!!!!!” (Jan is the grumpy woman who runs the blog; she scowls a lot.) Sometimes I just write something with lots of exclamation points, like, “Woo-hoo!!!!!!! Congratulations!!!!!!! You totally rock!!!!!!!!!!!!” Eventually someone suspects that I am taking the piss, and I am told to cut that shit out.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“The bias is often subtle, or even subconscious. People at HubSpot rarely talk about age bias, and when they do, they’re not talking about older workers being treated poorly. They’re talking about how unfair it is that people in their early twenties are not given enough responsibility, just because they’re young.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“I’m worried,” I tell him. “This place seems out of control.” Harvey says everything I’m describing about HubSpot is absolutely normal. “You know what the big secret of all these start-ups is?” he tells me. “The big secret is that nobody knows what they’re doing. When it comes to management, it’s amateur hour. They just make it up as they go along.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“A lot of these new start-up founders are somewhat unsavory people. The old tech industry was run by engineers and MBAs; the new tech industry is populated by young, amoral hustlers, the kind of young guys (and they are almost all guys) who watched The Social Network and its depiction of Mark Zuckerberg as a lying, thieving, backstabbing prick—and left the theater wanting to be just like that guy.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“a warning to young entrepreneurs: take money from a venture capitalist, and you’ll end up working for some smug, sarcastic, know-it-all prick like this guy, who will constantly tell you that you’re not working hard enough while he spends his days getting into arguments on Twitter.”
― Dan Lyons, Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us

“Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality. This happens at all organizations, but for some reason tech start-ups seem”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“Apple CEO Steve Jobs used to talk about a phenomenon called a “bozo explosion,” by which a company’s mediocre early hires rise up through the ranks and end up running departments. The bozos now must hire other people, and of course they prefer to hire bozos.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“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.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“At Newsweek, I get paid to meet amazing people and write about subjects that fascinate me: fusion energy, education reform, supercomputing, artificial intelligence, robotics, the rising competitiveness of China, the global threat of state-sponsored hacking.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“Have you transformed the way you innovate?" was Benioff's big line at the 2012 Dreamforce show. Note that you can switch the two buzzwords in the sentence and it still sounds good and still means nothing.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“By the occasion of the inaugural Fearless Friday I’ve come to realize that HubSpot is just as crazy as the rest of them. But all of HubSpot’s lofty bullshit about inspiring people and being remarkable and creating lovable content might actually be part of a cynical, and almost brilliant, strategy. HubSpot is playing the game, saying the kind of ridiculous things that investors now expect to hear from start-ups. HubSpot is feeding the ducks.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble