What does a baby boomer do when he finds himself the fish-out-of-water at a tech startup? Well, if you’re Dan Lyons, you write about it and expose a side of startup culture that we don’t usually see in the news. Xenium’s Brandon Laws leads a discussion with Tyler Meuwissen of Lyon’s latest book, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble. We’ll touch on all the hot topics, from “unicorns” and Silicon Valley culture to the free candy and flip flops, and offer our HR perspective on Lyons’ most interesting insights.
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Brandon: Welcome to the HR for Small Business podcast, this is your host Brandon Laws. Thank you very much for the download, we appreciate the support! And with that, we would love for you to go give us a review on iTunes and tell us what you think about the podcast and even tell us what kind of topics you’d like to hear. This podcast is about you, so definitely go to iTunes. Even if it’s not a 5 star rating, we’re okay with that! Just let us know how we’re doing.
That said, I have a returning guest with me, Tyler Meuwissen, glad to have you back, bud! We usually bring Tyler on for book club discussion. Although we’re not talking about book club at Xenium necessarily today, we are talking about a book.
Tyler: Yes.
Brandon: I tend to read a lot of random things. Maybe not so random as Tyler, here, he’s very well versed in literature, fiction, nonfiction, all of that stuff. Me, I tend to focus on the nonfiction. I ran across a book that had just released, actually, a couple weeks ago. It’s called Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble. It’s written by Dan Lyons who, for people who maybe followed his work he worked at Newsweek, he wrote on tech, business writing, I think he really wrote on Silicon Valley for the most part, just the whole industry. He refers to Silicon Valley as just the tech start-up, really. He doesn’t necessarily mean the San Francisco area but just the tech start-up.
He also then worked at HubSpot which is really what this book’s about. They’re a marketing automation company. And then he actually writes for Silicon Valley, the very popular series on HBO. So what I’d say about this book, and we’ll dive into the nitty gritty details, but I never really followed his writing before but when I started reading this I was captivated right off the bat. I mean, he’s funny—I think he’s a satirical writer, maybe you know more about his work.
Tyler: Yeah, I heard about this fake Steve Jobs blog, but I haven’t really read a lot of Dan’s stuff. But reading this book now, I’m so glad I picked it up because his writing style is very entertaining, it’s engrossing, it’s—
Brandon: I don’t know about you, but I stayed up late trying to read this book because I loved it. I never really feel that way about nonfiction books very often, but there’s several themes throughout this book and why it’s probably relevant to this audience. There’s a lot of culture themes. There’s a lot of the growth stuff. It’s all relevant to this
audience, there’s a lot of things they touch on that aren’t relevant to this, like the things that I found interesting was that they’re a marketing automation company, HubSpot is, and I’m so engrossed in that world in marketing that I found a lot of those things funny.Why don’t we just dive in? The book basically starts where he’s starting HubSpot, right? So he gets laid off from Newsweek in probably cutbacks or whatever and he’s looking for a new position. And he’s like, You know, I’ve been writing about Silicon Valley and the start-up community for so long, maybe I should just jump in. So he jumps into HubSpot, they’re a marketing automation company, I don’t know what year it was.
Tyler: 2013?
Brandon: It had to be like 2012 or something like that, maybe 2012 or 2013. And they’re in Boston, so it’s not Silicon Valley. It’s in his hometown, that was one of the reasons why he chose them. But also he knew that they were likely going to go to an IPO. So he saw growth opportunity, he heard a lot about the culture and how amazing it is. Why don’t you tell me what he quickly realized when he got to HubSpot? That was one of the more fascinating parts.
Tyler: The eye-opening thing is that he sees that they’re all very, very young.
Brandon: Like right out of college.
Tyler: Right out, could have been in college on an internship. But he realizes that he is probably twice as old as the average employee at this company. It’s very different.
Brandon: Because he’s in his mid-50’s at this point.
Tyler: Yeah, early-mid 50’s. So he realizes, he goes in there and there’s like a candy wall, there’s all these sleeping pods, and he’s kind of like—
Brandon: All these things you hear about at these big tech companies.
Tyler: Yeah, it brings him back to earlier in his career and these were the kinds of things he would imagine. And it’s very different than the way he’s used to working in a newsroom, a journalist room.
Brandon: Yeah, I think also the generational shock hit him right off the bat, but I also think the way he described that through the interview process, he’d been primarily dealing with the founders and he thought he’d be reporting to the Chief Marketing Officer. All of those people were either in their upper 30’s, maybe into their 50’s; I think the founders were in their 50’s. He thought that maybe he’d have direct access to them while this 24-year-old person is going to be his manager. I think there’s a little bit of shock at that. And you know, that’s not so bad in itself if that guy’s very competent and what not. But I think what he starts talking about is that some of these people weren’t very competent. Any thoughts about that?
Tyler: Yeah, he was under the assumption that he would be working underneath the founders and doing content that would directly relate to how they wanted to run the business. When he got in there he realized, well I’m actually going farther down that I thought I was going to be, reporting to a 20-something-year-old manager and him reporting to another manager and then it goes to the founders. So I think he was kind of wondering, where do I stand in this company? I just had an interview with the two founders, and I don’t think that’s where I’m being led at the start of my employment.Brandon: Yeah. You know, one thing I wanted to make sure the audience knew if they decided to pick up this book is that Dan Lyons, the author, fantastic writer, very funny, I was laughing so hard throughout this. He’s very cynical, though.
Tyler: That’s a good point!
Brandon: And part of that’s kind of funny, and so I think you should take this with a grain of salt. There’s probably some truth to what he’s saying. But there’s a generational gap is I guess what I’d say about, and he’s coming at it from a completely different perspective, meanwhile HubSpot, they’ve build this culture. And yeah, there’s people newer in their career and they work hard, play hard sort of thing. He alludes to that fact, they’ve been working here all day but still they want to stay and party afterwards. I think that’s just a difference. He would rather go home to his family, and you know, I could draw some parallels to myself too. As my career progresses, and now I have a family, yeah I’d rather go home! So I’m starting to see his point of view and I think that in the evolution, in the life cycle of an employee, age and all those things matter. I think everybody’s perceptions are quite different.
Tyler: Yeah. And in his case it’s going to be kind of like a jarring perception just because he’s that much more experienced than the average employee. So he’s definitely going to see things a little bit differently and it may not be the way he’s used to it, but that’s how they’re attracting talent.
Brandon: And that’s the thing, they’re a software company, basically. They’re a cloud-based marketing software company. So they need some newer, cheaper talent. And that’s another point he makes later on, they’re trying to get cheaper labor. So people right out of college make a lot of sense. And when you really talk about the culture, they’ve basically built it out to where they give them—they sort of meet the employees where they want. And he pokes fun at it, like Gosh, they’re paying these people $30,000-$35,000 a year! And who knows if that’s true or not. But the young adults are likely to love the free candy and sleeping pods and the parties than to make a higher wage, and that’s a generational difference.
Tyler: Yeah, sure. And he also kind of mentions the wage, like you said, but also I don’t really see the harm in them padding their resume, working for a known—
Brandon: Especially for such a high growth company!
Tyler: Exactly, you can’t really fault them for coming right out of college and wanting to get experience from a high profile tech company. And then if they leave after a little bit, so be it, but they at least have that on their resume to go to the next step. It’s a give and take.
Brandon: So what other things about the way he described the culture stuck out to you? There’s several things that stuck out to me like how even the Chief Marketing Officers were using words like awesome and sweet and wearing shorts and flip flops, that kind of stuff. I mean that’s pretty unique.
Tyler: That’s unique, I would find it annoying.
Brandon: It’s hard to take people seriously, I think!
Tyler: It’s hard to take people seriously. At the end of the day, you are running a company and you have projects and you have deadlines you’re working on. I think that kind of culture speak, in my opinion, is a little distracting. But for them if it’s working, they all seem to be doing it, everyone. It’s very peppy.Brandon: What’s funny is after he was writing those lines in the book about how they’re using words like awesome, I read that and I’m like, I use that word quite often! I do!
Tyler: That’s a tough word though!
Brandon: Yeah, but again, it’s my age as well. I’m a Millennial as you are, too. I sort of went in this, I think like Dan Lyons the author, but I’m in the group of Millennials. So it’s kind of funny, I sort of teeter in the middle.
Tyler: That’s the thing with our age, you know, in our early 30’s I think we’re kind of on the little gap between Gen X and Gen Y.
Brandon: Absolutely.
Tyler: So I think we can relate to both sides.
Brandon: Yep. So besides the way they portrayed the culture, the way Dan wrote about it in the book and about really how the culture is and how a lot of these tech companies are portraying their cultures and how they want to entice people, anything concern you about the way that they have the culture? I mean, I don’t know if there’s any red flags for you.
Tyler: Well, I think that the way their management style is, to me it’s a little bit concerning, especially just towards the end of the book when we have his manager kind of being a little bit abrasive.
Brandon: Very hostile. And how you get away with that is beyond me.
Tyler: I feel like this culture that’s enabled that at HubSpot is more passive aggressive.
Brandon: Absolutely.
Tyler: And they don’t really tell you their concerns, they don’t really approach you with any kind of feedback. It’s more circled around through your manager behind your back, in a sense.
Brandon: Totally. One example of that that actually really bothered me throughout the book—
Tyler: Yeah, that was really—
Brandon: The way they described “graduation.”
Tyler: Oh god. Oh no, that’s terrible.
Brandon: So for those who haven’t read the book, what it basically means is that when somebody gets terminated they “graduate.” And to me that’s…I don’t know. Just call it what it is. And they sort of danced around it and made it seem like it was a good thing. But they would give, like, nobody notice or even talk about it. I think they described, or Dan described, clear a floor before someone would be escorted out, basically. And maybe that saves face or whatever, but it just seems a little harsh. Like, hey, you’ve put blood, sweat, and tears into this work and we’re growing as a company, things are moving so fast but meanwhile, we’re going to “graduate” you. I’m using air quotes because I would never use those words.
Tyler: I would never use that term to describe it.
Brandon: The founder, he actually wrote a LinkedIn Pulse article in response to this book and basically said, looking back on the way we termed graduation, because people were asking if that was true, and he said, yeah, unfortunately that was true and we regret using that kind of language. But they thought it was the right thing to do at the time to maybe soften the blow a little bit for people.
Tyler: This kind of created an allusion that it’s not as severe or just putting a little bit of light, fluffy words to something that can be considered very—
Brandon: Just going back to the original question about the concerning part of their culture, what’s interesting is that they’re so clear about how they want their culture. In fact they have I feel like it’s a 200-page slide deck of language that they use, almost like a brand guide or something like that. But it’s really the culture and showing off pictures and how people treat each other. I think that’s awesome, honestly.
Tyler: Yeah, I liked that.
Brandon: That’s really good work and at least they’re crystal clear about it so they can attract a certain type of person. And I don’t think they have any trouble finding people.
Tyler: Oh, no.
Brandon: The one thing that does concern me though is, and Dan describes it in the book, is that they have a lack of HR. And who knows what it’s like now, but they had I think maybe one person, and so when Dan would go and say, hey, look, it’s like 25-year-old male and female white people. Where’s the diversity? What’s the stats on our diversity? And the HR department, maybe one or two people, didn’t have any data! So that was concerning to me, like, okay, we’re so crystal clear about our culture and where we’re going and what type of person we want, but we have no documented processes or even statistics on any of the things that are important to people—to the people practices, I mean.
So I thought that was fascinating, very concerning to me. What do you think?
Tyler: Yeah! Especially the lack of diversity. I mean he comes in there and a lot of it’s young, white males. The females, there’s a few females there but even they were kind of the minority in the group. So it’s kind of interesting to me that he would ask questions about where are they finding these individuals and the HR department…HR’s not really in the book as much because you don’t really know if it exists in this company. It’s more like managers.
Brandon: That’s what it seems like.
Tyler: Yeah. So I thought, like you said, that was kind of a jarring type of thing to see that, especially at this kind of up and coming tech start-up which is all focused on attracting creative minds and superstars to the company, and yet all the superstars are young, white males? Is that true?
Brandon: Yeah I don’t know! The thing is, it’s also a big company the way he describes it it’s almost like this smaller company and his group was pretty small, I think they’re a team of writers and bloggers. But the company, I think, at the time was probably 300-400 employees. I think now they might even have close to 1,000 because they’ve since gone through an IPO and actually throughout the book he’s talking about how they’re getting ready for that IPO and then everybody’s just stressed out, I think and probably working really hard. And once they get that IPO I think Dan pretty much removes himself from the company and he’s writing for Silicon Valley, the HBO show. I think the writing’s on the wall, he’s planning on leaving at some point.
Switching gears a little bit, what did you think about the way he described the lower wages and free stuff, even like stock options, just to create this value for employees? You’re a compensation guy, so what is your whole perspective on that particular comp model?
Tyler: It was interesting to me because we are seeing trends of having more benefits-related comp rather than strictly a cash incentive.
Brandon: Because normally we’d think about cash, bonuses, and like the actual benefits of medical, dental, those sort of things. But they’re sort of, and a lot of these tech companies, are doing it a little bit differently because they don’t necessarily have the cash, right? So they’re trying to do it in other ways. Describe that.
Tyler: Exactly. With unlimited PTO, they’re doing the beer on tap there—
Brandon: They’ve got huge parties—
Tyler: Parties, the sleeping rooms, the candy on the wall, the kind of fun atmosphere they’re portraying, that’s good and all and a lot of people find that enticing. I think in Dan’s case coming from a Gen X, Baby Boomers perspective, they more want the cash incentives and the medical benefits, that side rather than just the fun benefits.
And he even pitched that to, I mean, asked some of the employees there, do you not feel worried about how your wage is low just because they’re treating you to these benefits? They don’t seem to—
Brandon: They don’t seem to care!Tyler: It’s kind of like, I understand if these employees want to come onboard to the company because they value this culture where it’s more of a fun, lively atmosphere and then take a low pay. That’s fine, that’s their prerogative. I don’t think it’s really anyone trying to—
Brandon: You bring up an awesome point, and I always think of these things as—you know, we live in a world of information flowing nonstop and in the business world it has to be a mutual benefit to both parties to have a business transaction. And it’s sort of like how in sports, they always describe it as a business. They have these contracts and it’s like if it’s not meeting you where I am, we’re just going to part ways or I’m going to go a different route. And I think this is no different than that. If these companies are taking so much advantage of these people, they would pick up on it and probably would just bail and work somewhere else where they treat them good, they have a good culture, all that stuff, they get paid well.
So I think there’s a balance, there’s always an equilibrium to these things. And I don’t think one’s taking more advantage of the other or anything, I just think it’s—companies have got, from a culture standpoint, they have to meet employees where they are, if they want to retain and attract them. And I think, you know, they’ve done it as well as they possibly can even though, in this book, Dan’s pretty cynical about it. It’s pretty funny though.
So let’s talk about the generational stuff. He’s an X-er, probably on the high end of an X-er, like Generation X? Or is he a Boomer?
Tyler: Uh, well, if he’s low 50’s he’s probably an early Gen X-er, maybe a late Baby Boomer. Probably an early Gen X-er though.
Brandon: So the way he’s describing it from his vantage point versus the rest of the company, what did you think about those generational gaps? It’s pretty fascinating!
Tyler: I think that is kind of shocking to him, coming in and seeing this. The receptionist who looks like she’s just out of high school, people managing projects and doing these things but they’re early 20’s, can be kind of a shocking thing to him to see that. And the language, the culture speak is different than how he talks about it. He also brings up the point, too, in the journalist room how there would be cursing, there would be joking about these gratuitous—
Brandon: They wouldn’t be so sensitive about vulgar language.
Tyler: But here you’ve got more of a sensitive group who doesn’t like that kind of talk and they appreciate more of the simplicity of the language and I think that’s kind of, to him, that you can’t really be open in his eyes. His way of doing things is completely different.
Brandon: Yeah! There’s so many gaps, I mean, he talks about the style of communication, like how people would rather send him a quick instant message about something—
Tyler: And the calendar invites!
Brandon: Yeah, the calendar invites—he was saying anybody can see anybody’s calendar and just invite you and you’d accept everything. Because he was looking to learn and meet people and all that stuff. So he’d have no idea why he’s in these meetings but like he’d just accept everything.
Tyler: Back to back meetings, and someone would come up to him and if he wanted to get a coffee the next morning and he’d say yes, and the person would say Well send me a calendar invite. He was like, I can remember that, it’s tomorrow morning! No, send me a calendar invite.
Brandon: It is funny, I was snickering at that because I’m that way too, I like to have it on my calendar because we’re so technology based that you like to have it on your phone or if you’re on your iPad you want to be able to see your calendar, like Outlook. You just want to have everything integrated.
Tyler: And that too, another point that Dan brings up, when he goes on vacation, he completely unplugs.
Brandon: I couldn’t do that!
Tyler: That’s a generational thing. Because he goes and unplugs so he’s not seeing these emails coming through or getting any notifications or anything. He unplugs. And I think that’s, you wouldn’t see people nowadays do that. They would pretty much have their phone on them 24/7 if they’re doing something that’s tech. If you do, more power to you.
Brandon: And he’s so, here’s a couple points I want to make about that, because I don’t know if that’s necessarily a generational thing, because I believe that if you are so passionate about the work that you’re doing, you would want to have sort of a work-life integration where you’re sort of always connected, but you know when to turn it off. You can go in and out of it pretty good. He was not passionate about the work he was doing. He made it very clear in the book. And so I think part of it was he wasn’t passionate about it, so yeah he’s going to go unplug. It makes no sense for him to be plugged in.
So I wonder if it’s more of a passion thing than a generational thing. I don’t know, I’m just making that point.
Tyler: It’s hard to kind of label generationally, they do this one thing.
Brandon: So, we’re kind of running out of time, but what is your overall sort of takeaway from this book? I mean, there’s so many cool things about it. It’s funny, it’s concerning in some cases, it gives you some cool ideas for culture stuff, it tells you what to do, what not to do. What do you think?
Tyler: I think my biggest takeaway, and in seeing the way the book is kind of playing out is culture. That’s the central issue I think, and a company can create its own culture, but it has to happen organically. It has to happen with the employees, it has to be fluid. I didn’t like that HubSpot was just kind of forcibly accepting other kinds of culture ideas and just implementing them. Especially with the performance reviews and how they took “VORP,” this a baseball statistic to use in the performance evaluations, which I thought was abhorrent. I mean, that’s ridiculous, you can’t create value on a person like that, especially during a performance review. I just thought taking these culture things and trying to make them your own is not the way to go about creating culture at your company. I think it creates silos and it doesn’t include the variety of people in your office. A lot of businesses have people that run the gambit between Baby Boomers, Generation X, Y’s. I feel like when Dan came into HubSpot he was very siloed because he was the only one of this age who was here and he didn’t feel like he was included in this culture which they could’ve done a better job to include him into. So I thought the culture was kind of the element of it.
Brandon: Let me ask you this, because I think you bring up a pretty valid point. This company’s one thing, they have 25-year-old male and female people, no diversity, right? So you bring in someone like Dan Lyons who’s in his 50’s and your point was maybe they should shift the culture a little bit to bring in people like that and make it attractive for people like that. They are very clear about what kind of culture they want. At what point do you get so clear about your culture where you sort of in a way are discriminatory toward certain groups?
Tyler: Yeah, I feel like it’s borderline cultish.
Brandon: Totally! He actually mentions that word quite a bit.
Tyler: It alludes to some cultish activities, but yeah I think you start to alienate people and, yeah, company culture has to be adaptable. You can have some underlying principles about how you want your company to be expressed, but you’re going to have new people coming into your company every so often and they’re going to have a little bit different than what you want to portray, so you have to adapt, make concessions and try to include them, be inclusive. I think that’s all about inclusion and I don’t think that HubSpot was doing a great job to include Dan in their activities and frankly I don’t think that they really cared about changing. It was the HubSpot way or no way.
Brandon: Well said, sir. So before we wrap up, I always ask you, what kind of rating would you give this out of five?
Tyler: Oh five stars. Outstanding book.
Brandon: I 100% agree with you. I thought this book was fantastic. I loved it. And you know what’s funny is, before this book came out and the reason I picked it up is I’m a huge HubSpot fan. I consume so much of their content on the marketing side and a lot of what I’ve learned in marketing has honestly come from them. I actually, surprisingly, don’t think any less of them. I keep an open mind about a lot of this stuff and a lot of this stuff was several years ago. I think they’ve changed a lot of their ways. I mean, I think a little bit less of them after this book came out, but I still think they can change. Anybody can change. And this book probably makes them more aware of all the flaws.
Tyler: Yeah. I mean, I’ll agree, I’m a big fan of tech in general, tech companies.
Brandon: Me too. I think it’s huge for the economy. And as long as books like this come out and sort of shed light on the negative parts, these companies will keep iterating and refining their cultures and it can be a game changer. It could be really helpful to the economy. I think it’s really good. It’s healthy.
Tyler: And I definitely see this book creating a lot of buzz in the coming weeks, because it’s new, but definitely in the next coming months especially with a lot of these tech companies seeing nonprofitable quarters and stuff like that, I think you’re going to see a lot of people turn to Dan’s book and go, ok, well this is kind of enlightening about the tech sector in general. I think there’s a lot of good that tech start-ups do and I think we definitely need them and Portland’s getting a lot of tech start-ups coming up here, so it’s definitely appreciating. A lot of tech companies do right things, they do a lot of good things in culture. This kind of sheds light on one particular tech company that, during its start-up process, was not really doing things the right way. Now they could be changing that, especially after going to an IPO and doing that, so. It’s an outstanding book, I encourage everyone to pick it up and read it. You’ll read it so quickly, Dan’s such a great writer, excellent book.
Brandon: Good stuff. Great insights, I appreciate you coming on the podcast, Tyler. Tyler, if people could follow you Twitter, what’s your Twitter handle?
Tyler: Yeah! My Twitter handle is @Mayvesin.
Brandon: Awesome, we’ll link to it. I’m @BrandonLaws on Twitter if you’d like to follow me and I’m on LinkedIn, feel free to connect. Always looking to get feedback about our podcast and learn about topics you want to hear about, we’re just kind of shooting from the hip on topics. So feel free to just say, hey, I want to learn about this and we’ll get it out, we’re up for it. If you would, go to iTunes, give us a review, we’d encourage that just because we want other people like yourself to find a podcast and kind of spread the word. We’re picking up a lot of steam on the downloads, so we appreciate that. Tyler, again, thanks man.
Tyler: Thank you!