Disrupted: Ludicrous Misadventures in the Tech Start-up Bubble Paperback – 1 September 2016

Had good if not huge expectations of the book. But after a few pages of interesting read the later part felt like mostly ranting by a retiring employee who is finding it hard to accept the changed way of work. The author s anger against the unreasonable valuation of tech companies is something I agree with. But there's a lot of egotistical ranting as well mixed in there. It's not a good read for those who want to know how startups really work. It's mostly a compilation of the stupid work culture of one company.

The more things change the more they remain the same. This book is about the seamy side of the new economy.A place where oldies(above 40) are second class citizens and youngsters fresh out of college are brainwashed and exploited to the hilt by founders and venture capitalists.This book is very negative on startups but on the other hand I learnt a lot of new things. I empathise with the author as I am of his age and shudder to think of the treatment I would receive, should I find myself working in the valley.

The story of a 50 year old guy reinventing himself and joining the startup scene slowly turns into a rant. The author rants and raves throughout the book accusing everyone around him for not realising his brilliance, of not acknowledging his experience (he repeats his resume at least once every chapter) and not giving him his due. He claims everyone in a startup is ageist and doesn't like older employees but then turns around and calls younger employees as 'idiots' and 'bozos'. By the end he just sounds like a jilted employee trying to make a quick buck with a "tell all" book about a sector that's currently newsworthy.The sad part is that there are a few notable startup traits that are toxic and the author does mention them but the whole thing gets drowned out by what appears to be a rants of a raging lunatic. I later found that if you do an Internet search you'll find 15 minute videos of the author stating pretty much what is of worth in the book. I unfortunately, found out too late.

Respect, written from a journalist point of view. Felt lot of things he was writing was standard routine in any marketing department, let alone tech. But it's a fun perspective to read and let it soak in! Laughing at self is the greatest virtue, someone said and this book is a living proof!

Funny and worrying at the same time. "Trillion dollars changing hands" as the writer says

Its clearly gives the dominant people who care about white and Fake Steve Jobs..amazing book to read before you start a startup

Reverberating story

If you want to read about a 50 year old whining for 300 pages then you should buy this book. It's a book written out of prejudice and frustration and lacks any substance. The author is writing about his time at a company called hubspot and goes on to criticize every aspect of this company including its culture, employees, products and even it's co-founders. For most of the book I don't even sympathize with the author as he is clearly not a good employee and tries his best to get into trouble. When I picked up the book I thought I would learn a bit about the silicon valley company culture but this book is far from that, it's just a rant and a publicity stunt by an employee who just couldn't fit into the company or rather doesn't even try to do that. He doesn't just stop at hubspot but in one of the chapters he takes a dig at very prominent silicon valley VCs without any particular reason making the reader feel that its all out of ego and personal jealously. I don't normally give books under 3 stars but this one wasted a few hours I spent reading it. Avoid it!!

On balance I am pleased to have read this book. The writing is fluent - as one should expect from an ex-journalist - and indeed the whole thing reads like a very long news article (but still a fairly short book). I think the reader needs to complement this by looking at some of the social media responses to it and, in particular the response "Undisrupted" on LinkedIn from Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah, who are the main targets of Dan Lyon's often harsh, but possibly not entirely unjustified criticism. Read it, look at the responses and comments, compare with your own experience and make up your own mind. There is also a rather strange aftermath, covered to some extent in the last chapter of this Kindle edition. Some of the people he worked with tried to stop the book and two or three of them took some unspecified action that resulted in their being dismissed from the company or (allegedly) reprimanded. Unavoidably we are left to speculate on the details. You can find more about it in news reports etc.This book gives what looks to me like a credible account of what is really going on in the process of creating tech start-ups in the US and carrying them through to IPO and beyond. What's odd is that this author seems not to have known much of this before going to work for one of these start-ups despite having been a well-established and successful journalist writing about exactly this industry.He also writes convincingly about ageism in the industry and about the general cultish atmosphere in the company he joined and, very likely, others. But again, it is strange that he reports such surprise at all this. Did he really not know at all what to expect? Maybe, or maybe it's a technique for making us react more strongly to his narrative. Given that he was well known for a satyrical column, was his new employer really that surprised at his reactions to them? Just puzzling.On the one hand I an less than 100% sympathetic to this author. Some commenters have accused him of planning to write a book like this from the time he decided to look for a job in a tech start-up. He does say that part of his plan was to join the start-up and stick with it long enough to gain from the share options that he acquired for a year's service and it's quite consistent that he would also have regarded it as an opportunity to gather material from some sort of later writing. He also says, without any sense of fault, that he worked for quite a while on the production of blog posts without finding out what the company's business purpose was in doing it. When he eventually found out he was surprised and disappointed. The company gave him leave to take a completely different temporary job working with people more like him. He mentions their informal jokey atmosphere, but it sounds as though the jokes were often objectionable and might get people sacked fro other organisations. This gives a bit of a hollow ring to his complaints abbot the lack of diversity in the start-up he joined.But, having worked for decades in programming/computing/systems integration/IT/whatever you call it this week, I have to say I recognise some of the ageism and incompetence he complains of. I have been disregarded as an "old fogey" and have been associated with projects that were set up with huge overconfidence - including one case where dozens of people were employed generating a loss averaging at over £1 million each and another where the shocking thing about the dysfunctional team organisation was that the project's senior members had been congratulating themselves on how brilliant it was. Not exactly like Dan Lyon's experience, but near enough for the book to trigger unhappy memories.

This is the story of a 50 year old man who makes the mistake of going to work in a "unicorn" startup.As a 50 year old man who has recently started work in a startup myself, I should be the ideal reader. A lot of what happens is pretty scary, especially the epilogue when it turns out that the company tried dirty tricks (coercion, blackmail) to try to prevent the book's publication.There are stories of ludicrous mis-management, and the terrifyingly naive acceptance of stupid ideas such as "fearless Friday" by everyone around him.However, on a couple of occasions I did find myself siding with the young people around him. If you make a quip about The Beatles to someone who was born in 1990, why on earth would you expect them to know or care what you're talking about? What's wrong with putting a lunch appointment in your electronic diary? - it prevents someone inviting you to a meeting that would clash with it. He gets very upset about age discrimination, but I'm not sure he always helps himself.He does make some very important points about diversity in the tech industry. The leader of the company says he want to employ people who "he'd like to have a beer with" - and so, unsurprisingly, the workforce is almost exclusively young, metropolitan and white. "Not just white, but all the same kind of white", in the author's words.The fact that people can become so rich and powerful, by delivering a product that's so pathetically poor and while being so completely ignorant of the basics of good management, is what's really scary about this book.

This is a very interesting book....but it's very one sided.In the book Dan joins Hubspot and he's told how important it is to fit in. Now if I wanted to go for lunch or have a meeting with the person sitting next to me I would, like Dan ask the person for lunch. However, it's the Hubspot protocol/way/culture/ to invite someone via an intranet calander. That's the way they work and I'm a big believer if you join something you go with what's done. If everyone uses their own system it's chaos. You have a centralised system and everyone knows what works. Also, Dan would say that the environment was all frat boys and there were very few women working there, yet when he goes back to working in Journalism for a project he was right at home with all the knob jokes flying about - hardly an environment suitable for women.

I was expecting this to be a laugh-out-loud exposé of what it’s like to be a 50+-year-old in a start up full of 20-somethings. Some parts of the book fit that brief but there are many other parts that are darker. There are tales of bullying and being isolated at work that make it a tough read in parts. Lyons makes the point that Silicon Valley isn’t about technology but about making money — it’s the new investment banking. The aim is to invest in a start-up, take it to IPO, convince mom and pop investors to buy shares, and then get out while you can. The notion that a company should make a profit is irrelevant. Because the book had this darker side, I actually enjoyed it even more than I expected.

A really entertaining book that raises serious issues including; the culture of tech companies and the VCs that support them, the aggressive approach of such companies to employees, and the rampant greed that seems really detached from sensible, admirable values. It makes you think twice about supporting in any way such companies and about the benefits and dis-benefits of the so called gig economy and the culture and ethical system that it relies on which is completely opposite to the often meaningless public positions on culture and ethics.

Anyone who has ever worked in tech startup companies or knows someone who has must read this book. It's eye opening, scary and hilarious at the same time. Once I started this book I couldn't put it down and read it all the way through in one day. The reason I got this book it because someone close to me had gone to work in a very big famous tech startup company and after a short few months they had changed for the worse. I could see the company was changing them and taking over their life and with a little research online I came across this book. When I read it I quickly understood what was happening and it answered all the questions I needed to know. Very disturbing indeed.

The book is generally entertaining and very fluent, reading like the exposé it purports to be. A lot of the moments described are genuinely perplexing and hilarious, giving a unique insight into the odd Silicon Valley culture that Big (and Little) Tech is becoming renowned for. Too much money can really be a bad thing for a company.However, you do have to bear in mind that this is a single company, providing a somewhat less 'techy' product than the rest of the technology world - it's marketing from a new angle, but it is still marketing; thus, it's hard to really view this book's analysis as representative of startup culture in general, even more so when taking into account the author's sometimes confusing lack of self-awareness. It surely shouldn't be that unexpected to have a meeting where penis jokes aren't the norm, or where mocking the instructor isn't seen as funny by your colleagues (however much it may be). Also, for a person who reported on the startup world as the hot-shot editor of a magazine - which you are reminded of quite constantly as you read about the author's rapid descent down the food-chain - you would again expect him to have some idea of what he was getting into with a startup, in terms of flexible working arrangements, overly exuberant company culture, etc. but there is a definite impression of some artistic licence being employed to exaggerate his level of ignorance of the startup world, even though it does make for a funnier read.Regardless, it's easy to recommend this for a light read, though perhaps not as a job guide.

As a mid 40's developer there was a lot in this book that I could relate to, fortunately at a less intense level. Dan's disbelief at what he is witnessing, along with the "it must be just me" thoughts he has to try and rationalise things certainly struck home, as did his inclination to begrudgingly go along as best he could in some of the situations certainly seemed familiar.Whilst I was aware of the Fake Steve Jobs postings from years ago, it was never something I followed, and I was unaware of who Dan is, so I went into the book with no expectations, and came out presently surprised.With anything like this we're obviously only getting one side of the argument, but his case is convincing in isolation and certainly rings true.This is a worthwhile book that I'd recommend without hesitation, to any age range in a working environment. Certainly something I found difficult to put down.

An insightful look into the inner workings of a Tech start-up, particularly around some of the concepts and notions of financing and valuation. As a start-up founder in the tech space, it was a curious and enlightening read. I did take some of the stories with a pinch of salt and have read the counter blogs to this book. I've also attended an illuminating Dan Lyons talk in London about the book and his experience, which was consistent and entertaining.

The book is less funny than I expected. In fact, I think that Dan Lyon's assessment that he was acting as an anthropologist is a fair summary. However, it is accepted (if questionable) wisdom that the anthropologist is a neutral observer, which I think is not a trait that Dan shows. The book emerges more as a polemic against an inferred Venture Capitalist + Founder interaction which can leave small investors and workers out of pocket but generate fortunes for the founders and VCs. He notes that the startup does not need to be profitable, but needs to show continued strong revenue growth. He surmises that his requires strong marketing (blogs, ebooks, podcasts) and low-cost (read young) workers. Thus, the VC investment is spent less on product R&D (mostly software) and more on pressurised call centre staff.

Read because I wanted to understand more about the start up world. Relatable if you're Gen X or close. Loved how the author saw through the bull, some incisive comments. Depiction of emotional abuse towards the end, pretty unsettling. Glad I read.

Shocking insight into the inner workings of a modern tech company. The Author was treated appallingly with little accountability for, those in power. There are many people referenced in this book who should be hanging their heads in shame.

Truly enjoyed this read. I read this after reading the story of boo.com from the first dot com crash. This is a story of old habits dying hard, mistakes being easily repeated without any regard for investors money.Thoroughly enjoyed this witty and informative book, especially the commentary on the throngs of morons that now inhabit the earth using words like awesome sauce, and using 'like' as an introduction to every sentence they utter.

A very easy and enjoyable read. Loses a star because I think it's safe to say the author is not telling the full side of the story - for one thing, he seems to think nobody at a really successful company has any idea what they're doing... I'd love to believe it's that easy! I've been reading a lot of more earnest books by people involved in actually building successful companies and whilst they are probably more rewarding reads overall they weren't normally as enjoyable to read as Disrupted.

Its entertaining and hilarious at the beginning and working in high tech in the UK it is believe it or not (if you're not in high tech) pretty accurate and typical of the way stuff gets done, people behave and funding is raised. I read this in 24 hours because it was so compelling to me as it had lots of parallels to my own situation.I didn't give him four stars because sonething didn't sit right - maybe hubspot is very different to my experience but I also suspect its an element if journalists skeptism - but some things seemed to provoke an over reaction. The bad personal stuff at the end isn't what I mean ... its something else. Still good entertaining readd though.