Dan Lyons QUOTES

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

― Dan Lyons , Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

43 " 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. "

― Dan Lyons , Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

45 " Countless studies show that these nightmarish hellholes called “open offices” destroy productivity and make people miserable. Yet companies keep inflicting them on us, coyly pretending that the goal is to “foster collaboration,” when really it is to squeeze pennies out of overhead by packing more people into fewer square feet of floor space. "

― Dan Lyons , Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us

47 " Our spam is not spam. In fact it is the opposite of spam. It's anti-spam. It's a shield against spam -a spam condom. "

― Dan Lyons , Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

49 " Online marketers have invented euphemisms to make the work they do sound less awful. For example, we're told that our email campaigns do not involve badgering people, or pestering them - rather, we're "nurturing" them. "Lead nurturing is a big thing in the world of online marketing. "

― Dan Lyons , Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

51 " 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 ned to know about DISC. "

― Dan Lyons , Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

53 " Companies use various tests and methodologies. One popular test is called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. HubSpot uses a methodology called DISC, which stands for four basic personality types: dominant, influential, steady, and conscientious. You can be a mix of more than one trait—a D with a little bit of C mixed in, for example. The basic idea on all of these things is that you answer a zillion random questions, and a piece of software analyzes your answers to determine what kind of person you are. You do the test online. In the DISC assessment, you’re presented with statements to which you must answer yes or no. I am a neat and orderly person. I like peace and quiet. I am very persuasive. I am a very modest type. A week or so after filling out my questionnaire I am sent to a meeting where I will find out my results. It’s a group encounter, with about twenty people. I’m the only person from my department. The others seem to be mostly from sales. I don’t know any of them. 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 people picked up Marston’s concepts in the 1950s and 1970s, and used them to create personality assessment tests. The ideas are pretty much hogwash, and to make things worse, they are put into practice by people with no psychological training or expertise. At "

― Dan Lyons , Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

55 " Gazing down on this mess is like looking into the pit of Mordor. So many lost souls! These glorified car salesmen, these people whose jobs involve coercion and manipulation, whose lives revolve around making their numbers. Every month, every quarter, every year: sell, sell, sell! These are the people who took the Internet, one of the most wonderful and profound inventions of all time, and polluted it with advertising and turned it into a way to sell stuff. No wonder these zombies need to take a week off in San Francisco once a year, with some Deepak Chopra and maybe an eight ball of coke and a Canadian hooker to make the whole thing seem worthwhile. "

― Dan Lyons , Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

57 " I tell my board as little as possible,” he says. “I treat them like mushrooms, I keep them in the dark and feed them shit. I don’t want them meddling in my business and telling me what to do. "

― Dan Lyons , Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

59 " I don’t doubt that Dharmesh really does care about creating a company that people can love, but I am equally sure that Halligan cares only about the numbers. While Dharmesh obsesses about the five principles that make up HEART, Halligan’s big metric is something called VORP, or value over replacement player. The idea comes from Major League Baseball, where it is used to set prices on players. 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. "

― Dan Lyons , Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble