Dan Lyons Quotes

At HubSpot, VORP means evaluating the difference between what you are paid and the least amount the company could pay someone else to do your job. It's a vicious metric, with only one goal, which is to drive the price of labor as low as possible.

On the Internet, ginning up fake grassroots support is called astroturfing, and the tactic is generally frowned upon. I'm

Civilians is one term journalists use to describe non-journalists. Another is laypeople. Or normals.

come-to-Jesus meeting in

DISC is based on concepts created in 1928 by a psychologist named William Marston, who also created the comic book character Wonder Woman. That tells you pretty much all you need to know about DISC. Other

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.

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.

Another, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, suggests I need to change my Facebook photo to something that makes me look younger. I scan an old photo from my First Communion and make it my profile photo. There I am, age eight, wearing my First Communion robe, hands folded in prayer in front of me, looking angelic. "I'm trying to get a promotion at HubSpot," I write. "The 8-year-old version of me has lots of ideas about how to expand geographically while also driving up MRR by pushing into the enterprise.

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.

One day, Aaron Levie, the twenty-six-year-old CEO of Box, a well-funded new tech company, tells me it's really important to learn from what happened in the 1990s - which is why he has read a bunch of books about that era.

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.

Believing that your company is not just about making money, that there is a meaning and a purpose to what you do, that your company has a mission, and that you want to be part of that mission - that is a big prerequisite for working at one of these places. How that differs from joining what might otherwise be called a cult is not entirely clear. What is the difference between a loyal employee and brainwashed cultist? At what point does a person go from being the former to the latter?

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.

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.

In a room full of journalists someone would already be doing an impersonation of the Robot Man. We'd also make fun of the smarmy host, who is a bit like Tom Bergeron, host of Hollywood Squares, America's Funniest Home Videos, and Dancing with the Stars, only cheesier, which is remarkable because Tom Bergeron is already the gold standard of cheesiness, and yet here is this total amateur, this complete unknown, blowing Bergeron away.

There's an adage in Silicon Valley that people who use online services are not the customers. We're the product. As

Every morning, walking to work, I dodge a river of hipsters in skinny jeans and chunky eyewear riding skateboards - grown men! riding skateboards! - while carrying five-dollar cups of coffee to their jobs at companies with names that sound like characters from a TV show for little kids: Kaggle and Clinkle, Vungle and Gangaroo.