Author: Dan Lyons
“Disrupted - Ludicrous Misadventures in the Tech Startup Bubble” is an entertaining real-life “psychology experiment” (in the terms of its main character). In this funny and often cynical book, Dan Lyons allows us to share the couple of years of his life spent working for a typical Silicon Valley tech startup (HubSpot). So far, nothing earth shattering, right ? The thing is that Dan Lyons had never worked in a startup before: he had just spent more than 25 years as a journalist writing for Forbes and Newsweek. The other thing is that Dan was more than 50 years old (with lots of grey hair) when he joined the startup which has a mid-twenties average employee age ! The book depicts the culture shock Dan went through, but also some of the most questionable cultural traits of a Silicon Valley startup today. Let’s just say that it didn’t end well at many levels: including for 2 of Dan’s former managers at the startup who got fired for having tried to prevent the publication of the movie - and were investigated by the FBI for some of the not-totally-kosher-means they used to do so (i.e. hacking and extortion).
Book