Last week a friend said to me: Look, if you liked Uncanny Valley, then you will love Disrupted.  So I picked up the memoir Disrupted: My misadventure in the start-up bubble by Dan Lyons.  Dan is a fifty-two year old veteran journalist who joins a start-up called HubSpot.  Instantly, I am reminded of the movie The Intern where an older guy (Robert De Niro) joins a young start-up.  But the similarity ends there. 

Dan is a technology editor at Newsweek when he is unceremoniously dumped after years of service.  He joins Hubspot in the hope of starting over but the dramedy begins on day one when he is stunned to discover that his day-to-day manager is a twenty-something kid with no prior managerial experience.  He is seated shoulder to shoulder with other twenty-somethings in a content factory and finds himself increasingly isolated and alienated in a company where an executive brings in a teddy bear to stand-in for a client in the management meetings and employees are constantly “graduating” i.e. getting fired at short notice.  He hopes the situation will improve when a new manager arrives on the scene but unfortunately, this person turns out to be erratic and unpredictable in his behavior.  Things turn truly ugly when Dan announces that he will be publishing a book on his time in HubSpot after leaving the company.  Two senior executives are caught employing aggressive tactics in an effort to procure the manuscript and one of them is fired by the board.  The FBI step in to investigate the matter. 

Dan is a seasoned satirist and wearing an anthropologist’s hat, he has penned a page turner that not only chronicles his time at the startup but also casts a critical eye over the bubble economics and excesses that prevail in the new economy.  The book is full of incidents, both hilarious and cruel, that tempt you to believe that they are fictional but sadly, are real and you marvel at the fact that millions of dollars of venture capital funding have gone into propping up staggering levels of ridiculousness.  Dan quotes a line by W.C Fields that is sure to stay with me: If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. 

Sweet.