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1 " Try to imagine the calamity of that: Zack, age twenty-eight, with no management experience, gets training from Dave, a weekend rock guitarist, on how to apply a set of fundamentally unsound psychological principles as a way to manipulate the people who report to him. "
― Dan Lyons , Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
2 " I rationalize this by telling myself that while the work might be ignoble, it's not necessarily evil. We're not Hitler - we're just annoying people. "
3 " Young guys moving west after college no longer hope to become the next Steve Jobs, they want to become the next Mark Andreassen. The Valley has become a Casino where the VCS and Angel Investprs blindly bumping money into every slot machine hoping to hit the Jackpot. The difference is that the bunter who gets lucky on a slot machine doesn’t walk away convinced he is a Genius.Instead of writing about tech, the industry‘s bloggers now write about venture deals and who raised how much at what valuation. The Valley has become obsessed with money, and there is a lot of it around. "
― Dan Lyons , Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
4 " Have you transformed the way you innovate?" was Benioff's big line at the 2012 Dreamforce show. Note that you can switch the two buzzwords in the sentence and it still sounds good and still means nothing. "
5 " ...they sell dollar bills for seventy-five cents and take credit for how fast they’re growing. "
6 " If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit” seems like the motto not just for Chopra but for the entire conference. Benioff and his philanthropy, the dry ice and fog machines, the concerts and comedians: None of this has anything to do with software or technology. It’s a show, created to entertain people, boost sales, and fluff a stock price. "
7 " Any place with a founder who brings a teddy bear to meetings,” he writes, “is a step away from Jonestown. "
8 " 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. "
9 " Our brains are wired to deal with stress that is intense but brief, like escaping from a predator or fleeing from a burning building. We’re not wired to handle chronic, ongoing stress, even if it is relatively mild. "
10 " Grow fast, lose money, go public, get rich. That’s the model. "
11 " There’s an adage in Silicon Valley that people who use online services are not the customers. We’re the product. As "
12 " Civilians is one term journalists use to describe non-journalists. Another is laypeople. Or normals. "
13 " You tell them that you’re doing this not because you want to save money on office space but because this is how their generation likes to work. "
14 " 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. "
15 " 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. "
16 " A lot of these new start-up founders are somewhat unsavory people. The old tech industry was run by engineers and MBAs; the new tech industry is populated by young, amoral hustlers, the kind of young guys (and they are almost all guys) who watched The Social Network and its depiction of Mark Zuckerberg as a lying, thieving, backstabbing prick—and left the theater wanting to be just like that guy. "
17 " At Newsweek, I get paid to meet amazing people and write about subjects that fascinate me: fusion energy, education reform, supercomputing, artificial intelligence, robotics, the rising competitiveness of China, the global threat of state-sponsored hacking. "
18 " a warning to young entrepreneurs: take money from a venture capitalist, and you’ll end up working for some smug, sarcastic, know-it-all prick like this guy, who will constantly tell you that you’re not working hard enough while he spends his days getting into arguments on Twitter. "
19 " 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. "
20 " 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. "
