Review: ‘Disrupted,’ a Tech Takedown by Dan Lyons, a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs

My own take on this but as "any publicity is good publicity", I am loathe to give "Disrupted" more attention than it deserves.

Book summary: Dan Lyons' job as Newsweek technology editor gets eliminated. Deciding to cash in on the current startup boom, he finds a somewhat obscure pseudo-corn and signs up. After wacky adventures, it ends in tears and legal action.

After skimming the various excerpts of "Disrupted", I read the whole thing last night. To paraphrase Elvis Costello, I started being amused and now I'm disgusted. But not for the ostensible reasons that the book strongly tries to influence the reader to believe.

My personal background is having worked in tech for a long time, serving in a range of companies: big, middling and startup since the late 80s. I've personally seen things more horrible (and funny) than anything in this book. All of the issues Lyons' calls out, have been in play as long as I've been in this business.

That's not to say I endorse them - rampant age discrimination, cult-like manipulation of employees, screwing most employees on liquidity outcomes, etc. But it's nothing new. Lyons claims to have been writing technology, starting with trade rags, for the past 20 years and it shouldn't be anything new to him either.

What runs strong and straight through "Disrupted" is that Lyons' joined a company without sufficient due diligence. Whatever the merits of HubSpot, it was/is a machine for marketing and sales. Lyons was under the impression that by giving arrant speeches and writing pieces for a consciously elite audience - explicitly not the HubSpot prospect base, the world would come to his door.

That's just not how the real world works. Nothing he did contributed directly or seemingly indirectly to the HubSpot bottom line. The founders were trying to puff that thing up for an IPO. Ultimately, a little image work at a high salary wasn't satisfactory, regardless of their ethical failings.

One can easily imagine an alternative universe where Lyons' bosses approved his separate "glossy" magazine-oid website, and he spent two years emitting ephemeral think pieces. This book would never have been written. Lyons' might have moved on after IPO with a little money and connections to join the Scoble Set at the next cool startup.

It's obvious that Lyons views elite media people as being on another level from the rest of us. In a sense it's an analog of tech pedigree nonsense, where if you're not ex/current NYT or Time, you obviously lack the necessary insight to really understand things.

Spite and jealousy do not constitute a platform from which to pontificate on the tech industry. Compare "Disrupted" with the recent "The Everything Store" about Amazon. The latter certainly has lots of dark insight, but no sense that it was written because the author wasn't allowed another cookie.