Disrupted

by Dan Lyons

  Thus, what we’re creating is not spam. In fact, the official line is that HubSpot hates spam, and wants to stamp out spam. We want to protect people from spam. Spam is what the bad guys send, but we are the good guys. HubSpot has even created a promotional campaign, with T-shirts that say MAKE LOVE NOT SPAM. This is breathtaking and brazen. This is pure Orwellian doublespeak. Night is day, black is white, bad is good. 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.

  To me this seems like complete bullshit. Of course we’re creating spam. What else can you call it when you blast out email messages to millions of people? For years after I leave HubSpot I will continue to receive “lovable marketing content” from HubSpot marketing people. The messages are addressed “Dear Marketing Fellow” and offer a free software download or invite me to check out an e-book. Some are addressed to Heinz Doofensmirtz, the CEO of Doofensmirtz Evil, Inc., because I once filled out a form using that name, too. “Hi Heinz,” says a note from my good friend and former manager, Wingman. “Do you know the ROI on Doofensmirtz Evil, Inc.’s marketing efforts?”

  In December 2015, as I write this, I am still receiving them. Just this morning I got one from a “senior growth marketing manager,” offering me a six-hour course about inbound marketing and a certification. Once I pass an exam, I will get a “personalized badge and certificate.” I can add this to my LinkedIn profile, or even “proudly hang it on your desk,” my friend from HubSpot writes.

  I get loads of these emails, all sent under the names of real people at HubSpot, often from people I know and worked with, including Wingman. The emails are set up to look like actual personal email messages. Instead of coming from a generic address like offers@hubspot.com, they come from an individual’s HubSpot email address and include a sign-off with that person’s name and title and Twitter handle at the bottom, under a closing like, “All the best,” or “For the love of marketing.”

  This is what we learn in our training sessions. This is what we’re taught how to do. I can’t tell if the people around me actually believe this rubbish we’re being fed. They seem to, but maybe they’re just playing along. As for me, I am completely transfixed. I’ve never seen or heard anything like this. Have you ever received a call from one of those annoying telemarketers and wondered what it must be like on his end of the phone? How many people are in the room where he is sitting? How does he talk people into buying whatever he’s selling? How did he learn how to do this? How does he rationalize what he does? The online version of that telemarketer’s world is the one that I’ve now entered. I’m in the Land of Spam, learning how to send email to lists of names in the hope that some teeny tiny percentage of the recipients will open my message and buy something. It’s appalling, but also fascinating. I have to learn more.

  “You all must be pretty special to be here,” Dave, our trainer, tells us. “HubSpot gets thousands and thousands of applications. Just to be sitting here in this room means you’ve climbed past a lot of other really exceptional people. Did you know that it’s harder to get hired at HubSpot than it is to get accepted at Harvard?”

  That line about Harvard is one that gets tossed around a lot. I hear it over and over again. Halligan likes to tout it. I have no idea how they came up with the claim, but Harvard has a 6 percent acceptance rate, so I suppose they just figured out that in a certain year HubSpot had hired fewer than 6 percent of people whose resumes they had seen, so that makes HubSpot more exclusive than Harvard. This is ridiculous, and oddly enough not that big of a deal: McDonald’s and Walmart have at times also hired fewer than 6 percent of job applicants. Nevertheless, people at HubSpot take it seriously. I suppose it makes the new hires feel special.

  HubSpot seems to recruit a certain kind of person: young and easily influenced, kids who belonged to sororities and fraternities or played sports in college. Many are working in their first jobs. As far as I can tell there are no black people, not just among my recruiting class, but across the entire company. The HubSpotters are not just white but a certain kind of white: middle-class, suburban, mostly from the Boston area. They look the same, dress the same. The uniformity is amazing.

  HubSpot prides itself on having numbers for everything—it’s a data-driven organization—and for being radically transparent. Yet oddly enough, HR, or “people operations,” as it is called, claims to have no statistics on diversity. One day, after sitting through a company meeting and noticing the bleachy-clean, driven-snow, Mormon-level whiteness of the crowd, I send an email to a woman in HR asking if we have any statistics about diversity. She sends back a terse response: No. Why?

  Rounding up the right kind of eager-beaver young white people is just the first step. Next, HubSpot applies a two-part process of indoctrination. First the newcomers are reminded how lucky they are to be here. Then comes the threat, which is that HubSpot is so competitive, and so intense, that a lot of people simply can’t make the grade.

  “Look around the room,” Dave says. “A year from now, a lot of the people around you aren’t going to be here anymore.”

  At HubSpot only the best survive. Getting in is just the first step. Now we all have to earn our place on the team. For the people who are going to work in the sales department this process will be particularly brutal. The reps have high quotas, and if you fall short, you get cut. Most companies put sales reps on a quarterly or annual quota. At HubSpot the quotas are monthly, which means sales reps never come up for air. The sales department churns through these young hires. Bring them in, burn them out, toss them away, find new ones—that’s the model.

  In every aspect of life, we’re told, there is a HubSpotty way of doing things. Nobody can really explain what HubSpotty means, but it is a real word that people use, all the time. Some people are more HubSpotty than others. Some are 100 percent HubSpotty, possessed of a HubSpottiness that is so complete as to be beyond reproach. Those people “bleed orange.” Their ideas cannot be questioned. They can do pretty much anything they want. They are the HubSpot equivalent of a Level 8 Operating Thetan in Scientology.

  Newcomers are by definition not HubSpotty yet. We have to earn that designation, and it takes time. Nobody just comes in and gets accepted. A big part of establishing your HubSpottiness involves being relentlessly upbeat and positive. HubSpot is like a corporate version of Up with People, the inspirational singing group from the 1970s, but with a touch of Scientology. It’s a cult based around marketing. The Happy!! Awesome!! Start-up Cult, I began to call it. Instead of ID badges, the company gives out rubber ID bracelets with the HubSpot logo on them. The bracelets contain a transponder that unlocks doors into different parts of the office. It feels ridiculous and cultish to wear a special bracelet, but you can’t get anywhere without one.

  I’ve spent years writing incredibly over-the-top satire about the technology industry, inventing stories in which Steve Jobs possesses the power to hypnotize people just by staring at them, and depicting Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, as a crazy cult compound policed by rifle-toting public relations people and populated by brainwashed corporate zombies who speak their own private jargon and all truly believe they are doing incredibly important work, making the world a better place.

  Now I am encountering a real-life version of this, at a company in Kendall Square. It’s amazing. It’s the craziest, best thing ever. I love this place the way I love movies like Showgirls and Battlefield Earth and anything with Nicolas Cage—movies that are so bad you can’t believe they exist, yet you’re glad they do, movies that are so bad that they’re good.

  Five

  HubSpeak

  So I can be the DRI on this, or Jan and I can be DRIs together, and we’ll coordinate with Courtney to work up some potential KPIs, and then we can all meet again in like a week or two and we’ll present some ideas and then we can develop an SLA. Does that sound good?”

  This is Marcia, the senior member of the blog team, talking to the content
team, of which I am now a member. I’m about one month into my time at the company. I’ve finished my training program. I’ve still never heard anything from Cranium about what he wants me to do. So every day I just show up and say yes to every meeting that I’m invited to attend. There are lots of meetings. Endless meetings. Entire days book up with meetings.

  This meeting is taking place in a conference room on the second floor. We’re sitting around a table, each of us with a laptop open. In attendance are the three women from the blog team—Marcia, Jan, and Ashley—and three women who write e-books, plus Paige, who has been hired to do market research.

  Zack is nominally in charge. He has called the meeting because he wants the blog team to start coordinating its efforts with the e-book writers. The truth is that Zack is new and he’s young, and two of the women on the blog team have been here for years and they can’t stand the women who write the e-books and they have no intention of doing anything that Zack says. So Marcia is just yessing him to death, and filling the air with gibberish and jargon, things like KPI, DRI, SLA, TOFU, MOFU, SFTC, and SMB.

  I have no idea what any of this mean. Afterward I pull Zack aside and ask him for a translation.

  “TOFU and MOFU refer to the sales funnel—top of funnel and middle of funnel,” he says. “SFTC means solve for the customer. SMB is small and medium-size business. SLA means a service-level agreement. DRI means directly responsible individual—it means the person who will be in charge of this task. KPI means key performance indicator, or what are the goals of this project.”

  Put them all together, and what Marcia was saying was that she and Jan would be in charge of the project—they’ll be the DRIs—and they would try to figure out some suggested goals for the project, meaning the KPIs, and once they had those in place then the two teams, blog and e-book, could go over the goals and revise them, and finally agree on which things each side needs to do for the other on a monthly basis. That agreement will form the SLA, or service-level agreement.

  Both teams need to bear in mind that they need to create some content for new prospects—the TOFU people—and different content for leads that are already in our system, or MOFU. All of the content should be aimed at SMBs, and all of the ideas should be based on what customers need, rather than what the writers think is interesting, because at HubSpot we’re supposed to always solve for the customer, or SFTC.

  I want to tell Zack that they all need to STFU because WTF does any of this have to do with how ordinary human beings actually speak to one another. Instead, I try a more diplomatic approach.

  “Why don’t we just say, ‘Who’s going to be in charge of this?’ And instead of asking about KPIs, we could say, ‘What are the goals?’ That would be like speaking English. You know what I mean?”

  Zack says he does know what I mean. He majored in English at college. But these are the terms people use here.

  HubSpot has its own language, with so many terms and acronyms that they’ve created a special page on the corporate wiki where new people, like me, can look things up. HubSpeak is what I start calling it, but only to myself.

  Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality. This happens at all organizations, but for some reason tech start-ups seem to be especially prone to groupthink. Drinking the Kool-Aid is a phrase everyone in Silicon Valley uses to describe the process by which ordinary people get sucked into an organization and converted into true believers. Apple and Google are famous for being filled with Kool-Aid drinkers. But every tech start-up seems to be like this. Believing that your company is not just about making money, that there is a meaning and a purpose to what you do, that your company has a mission, and that you want to be part of that mission—that is a big prerequisite for working at one of these places.

  How that differs from joining what might otherwise be called a cult is not entirely clear. 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.

  At HubSpot, employees abide by precepts outlined in the company’s culture code, a document that codifies HubSpot’s unusual language and sets forth a set of shared values and beliefs. The culture code is a manifesto of sorts, a 128-slide PowerPoint deck titled “The HubSpot Culture Code: Creating a Company We Love.”

  The code’s creator is Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot’s co-founder. Inside the company he is always referred to simply by his first name, Dharmesh, and some people seem to view him as a kind of spiritual leader. Dharmesh claims it took him one hundred hours to make the slides. He sent me a link to the slide deck a few days after I interviewed with him and Halligan, I suppose as an inducement to join the company. He said it was a slide deck that “describes HubSpot’s culture.”

  The code depicts a kind of corporate utopia where the needs of the individual become secondary to the needs of the group—“team > individual,” one slide says—and where people don’t worry about work-life balance because their work is their life.

  In creating this manifesto Dharmesh is actually conducting an interesting experiment. Corporate cultures usually evolve organically, but Dharmesh is trying to create a culture artificially and impose it on his organization. The use of the word we in the subtitle of the code—“Creating a company we love”—implies a sort of consensus. In reality, Dharmesh is a creating a company that he loves and hoping to persuade his employees to love it along with him.

  The culture code asks, “What does it mean to be HubSpotty?” and then defines the meaning of that term explaining a concept that Dharmesh called HEART, an acronym that stands for humble, effective, adaptable, remarkable, and transparent. These are the traits that HubSpotters must possess in order to be successful. The ultimate HubSpotter is someone who can “make magic” while embodying all five traits of HEART.

  Much of the code is “aspirational,” as Dharmesh concedes, meaning that some of these values are ones that HubSpot doesn’t actually put into practice yet, but hopes to someday. One of HubSpot’s values involves being transparent, and not just transparent but “radically and remarkably transparent.”

  The culture code has been an enormous PR coup for the company and a model that a lot of other start-ups have emulated. When Dharmesh posted his slides online they received more than one million views. This inspired him so much that now he is setting out to write a book about corporate culture.

  Dharmesh fancies himself a kind of New Age management guru, a person who can teach other people how to run companies—which is odd because, as I will discover after a few months at the company, Dharmesh doesn’t run the engineering department and as far as I can tell he doesn’t seem to have any day-to-day role at HubSpot. He is, however, an important investor. He put up $500,000 in seed money to start HubSpot, and he owns nearly 9 percent of the company, more than any other individual. The only entities that own more are HubSpot’s venture capital investors. If Dharmesh wants to use HubSpot as his testing lab for a corporate culture experiment, he can tinker all he wants.

  Dharmesh’s culture project is unusual enough that a sociology professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2012 spent several months embedded at HubSpot, studying its culture. Unfortunately, when I write to the professor and ask to interview her for an article, she tells me she has promised HubSpot that she will not mention them by name unless they give her permission, and they won’t do that until they see what she’s going to publish. So much for HubSpot’s commitment to “radical transparency.” The MIT professor is so careful about her relationship with HubSpot that when she writes back to me, she makes a point of copying HubSpot’s VP operations and people ops, who is also known as our “culture tsar,” on the
email. I let it go.

  Dharmesh’s culture code incorporates elements of HubSpeak. For example, it instructs that when someone quits or gets fired, the event will be referred to as “graduation.” This really happens, over and over again. In my first month at HubSpot I’ve witnessed several graduations, just in the marketing department. We’ll get an email from Cranium saying, “Team, Just letting you know that Derek has graduated from HubSpot, and we’re excited to see how he uses his superpowers in his next big adventure!” Only then do you notice that Derek is gone, that his desk has been cleared out. Somehow Derek’s boss will have arranged his disappearance without anyone knowing about it. People just go up in smoke, like Spinal Tap drummers.

  Nobody ever talks about the people who graduate, and nobody ever mentions how weird it is to call it “graduation.” For that matter I never hear anyone laugh about HEART or make jokes about the culture code. Everyone acts as if all of these things are perfectly normal.

  HubSpotters talk about “inspiring people,” “being remarkable,” “conquering fear,” and being “rock stars” and “superstars with super powers” whose mission is to “inspire people” and “be leaders.” They talk about engaging in delightion, which is a made-up word, invented by Dharmesh, that means delighting our customers. They say all of these things without a hint of irony. This is really how people talk, every day. They use these exact words, all the time.

  The ideal HubSpotter is someone who exhibits a quality known as GSD, which stands for “get shit done.” This is used as an adjective, as in “Courtney is always in super GSD mode.” The people who lead customer training seminars are called inbound marketing professors, and belong to the faculty at HubSpot Academy. Our software is magical, such that when people use it—wait for it—one plus one equals three. Halligan and Shah first introduced this alchemical concept at HubSpot’s annual customer conference, with a huge slide behind them that said “1 + 1 = 3.” Since then it has become an actual slogan at the company. People use the concept of one plus one equals three as a prism through which to evaluate new ideas. One day Spinner, the woman who runs PR tells me, “I like that idea, but I’m not sure that it’s one-plus-one-equals-three enough.”