20 Quotes by Dan Lyons

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.

There’s an adage in Silicon Valley that people who use online services are not the customers. We’re the product. As.

Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with twenty other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult. It’s amazing, and hilarious. It’s everything I ever imagined might take place inside a tech company, only even better.

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.

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.

Any place with a founder who brings a teddy bear to meetings,” he writes, “is a step away from Jonestown.

Reporters are trained to hate corporate jargon and to eliminate it, not to engage in it. We’re expected to be cynical and skeptical, not to be cheerleaders.

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.

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.