On Friday (August 8th), the GrepBeat Book Club reunited for a seventh meeting after a brief summer break. Following last meet-up’s dive into pseudo-apocalyptic tech fiction (“The Future” by Naomi Alderman), we veered back into non-fiction with the popular book “Disrupted: My Misadventure inthe Start-Up Bubble” by Dan Lyons.
This title sparked a strong turnout, and as usual we welcomed a mix of increasingly regular attendees and Book Club newcomers. For those who may be reading this review but who haven’t attended one of these meetups, we often find that the book discussion itself is a nice bridge to getting to know people from around the tech and startup community. (I suppose that’s the point of book clubs.)
If you’d like to join us next time around, we’ll be getting together at the GrepBeat HQ in Durham on Friday, October 10th at 8:30am (and with a regular schedule of every second Friday of every second month thereafter). Meanwhile, here’s a recap of “Disrupted.”
The Book in 150 Words
Dan Lyons was a 25-year journalist when he lost his job happily covering tech for Newsweek. Suddenly astray with a family to take care of, he fretted over a career pivot in his early 50s. Then he found an unexpected opportunity within the exploding tech industry he’d long written about.
Lyons accepted stock options and a respectable salary to be a “marketing fellow” with HubSpot, a Boston startup flush with venture capital and aiming to pioneer inbound marketing. But upon his arrival at the company’s fantasy-land HQ—an insistently orange complex full of bean bags, foosball tables, and kitchens—Lyons found his position ill-defined, his bosses largely absent, and the culture around him cult-like.
With this book, Lyons amusingly exposes the nastier aspects of a high-growth tech startup, touching on everything from blatant ageism to the fact that even executives racing toward IPOs can’t always articulate what a company does.
What Book Club Thought
We had a lot of knowing reactions.
Throughout this particular book club discussion, I couldn’t help but wonder what a totally different group—one not filled with people who have experience in tech and/or startups, or one convened in 2016, when the book came out—might have had to say about it. One can imagine the insights Lyons conveys and the dirt he reveals being shocking to a different crowd, or even this one at a different time. But for The GrepBeat Book Club in 2025, it felt like what might otherwise be shocking insights were a bit familiar, and in some cases a bit close to home.
By and large people seemed to have found some humor in how Lyons goes about exposing the HubSpot cult, and the general ridiculousness of (some) tech-boom startups. There’s no doubt the man can turn a phrase (he was a writer for the HBO comedy Silicon Valley even while working for HubSpot) and his depictions of confused hierarchies, nonsensical culture construction, and the cutthroat race to an IPO are at times gripping and/or amusing.
Yours truly found the whole project to be a bit unfocused—caught somewhere between a complaint about workplace ageism, an airing of (justified) personal grievance against a single superior, a lampooning of startup culture, and, in the end, a somewhat random plea to take digital privacy seriously.
3/5 stars.
Notable Quotes
- “… while the work might be ignoble, it’s not necessarily evil… Sure, arguably we are making the world a little bit worse—but only a little. That’s what I tell myself.”
- Editor’s take: It’s hard to read stuff like this and not wonder how many of us have had a similar thought in a given job, and how many “little bits worse” we could avoid if we followed our principles.
- “What is the difference between a loyal employee and a brainwashed cultist? At what point does a person go from being the former to the latter? The lines are fuzzy. Perhaps by accident, or perhaps not, tech companies seem to employ techniques similar to those used by cults, the creation of special language being one example.”
- Editor’s take: These are indeed cultish times.
- “The cheerleading and delusions of grandeur are staggering.”
- Editor’s take: This line may actually come closest to summing up Lyons’s perspective. He seemed to find that there were no bounds to how ridiculous HubSpot could act and how serious it could take itself at same time.
- “The whole thing is based on companies trying to achieve escape velocity before they blow themselves up.”
- Editor’s take: This is not actually something Lyons said, but rather something he heard from a “former investment banker and venture capitalist.” Seems, while cynical, like a useful observation.
What’s Next For Book Club
Next Book: “Microserfs” by Douglas Coupland
Next Meeting: Friday, October 10th at the GrepBeat HQ in Durham. Let us know you’re coming!
Some Comments: A few meetings ago, we asked our whole Book Club email list to vote and/or comment on a number of selections. “Disrupted” was the runaway favorite, and “Microserfs” was the runner-up. This one will take us back into the realm of fiction and has long been regarded (it was published in 1995) as an amusing interpretation of Silicon Valley’s earlier days.
The synopsis, per Bookshop.org: They are Microserfs—six code-crunching computer whizzes who spend upward of sixteen hours a day “coding” and eating “flat” foods (food which, like Kraft singles, can be passed underneath closed doors) as they fearfully scan company e-mail to learn whether the great Bill is going to “flame” one of them. But now there’s a chance to become innovators instead of cogs in the gargantuan Microsoft machine.
The intrepid Microserfs are striking out on their own—living together in a shared digital flophouse as they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world.
