by Dan Lyons
Who is Mary? HubSpot has created a slide that describes her. She has a bachelor’s degree in communications from Boston University, and an MBA from Babson. She’s 42 years old and has two kids, ages 10 and 6. According to the women on the blog team, Mary responds best to articles like “How to Create a Facebook Brand Page,” “Here Are 15 Free Stock Photos You Can Use,” and “Five Tips for Effective Email Marketing.” Mary also loves pictures of cute baby animals.
Marcia, Jan and Ashley are great at writing for Mary. They understand Mary, because they are a lot like Mary. Me? Not so much. I am trying to write articles for venture capitalists and CEOs. My articles are of no interest to Mary. Much to my chagrin, Marcia, Jan, and Ashley are way better at this than I am. Despite all my experience as a journalist, maybe because of it, I’m lousy at writing lead-gen blog posts. I have no aptitude for it.
My articles might be interesting, and some generate a lot of traffic, but we don’t get many leads from them. My readers are not shopping for marketing software. They don’t want an e-book, and won’t fill out any forms. In marketing lingo, my stuff does not “convert well.” Thus every time Jan publishes one of my articles, she’s using up a slot that could have been given to a lead-generation post. As a result, the blog has been falling short of its lead-generation goal. The guys in the sales department are yelling at Wingman. Wingman is yelling at Jan.
No wonder Jan is always walking around looking as if someone just left a turd in her backpack. Her job is tough enough already, and I’m making it harder. On top of that I’ve had the temerity to write a memo insulting her work. As far as Jan is concerned, I am not an asset. I’m a detriment. I’m the reason Jan is missing her quota. Clearly, this is a problem.
One day a few weeks after my memo critiquing the blog I get a calendar request from Wingman, via email. He wants to have lunch. We go to the California Pizza Kitchen at the Galleria mall, across the street from HubSpot’s building. Over lunch, Wingman tells me that our little experiment with producing smarter content—meaning, the stuff I’ve been writing—is not working.
Wingman has decided that we need to end this kooky experiment with smart content and go back to what works: really basic stuff, the kind of thing that people who know almost nothing about the Internet would be likely to search for on Google. That’s what Mary wants to read, and that’s what we are going to give her. HubSpot’s blog is already packed with low-end content, like “12 Tips for Doing Awesome Email Marketing” and “How to Make Chrome Your Default Web Browser.” Wingman says we need to ratchet things down even further. There is an even lower level whose depths we have not yet plumbed.
Basically Wingman is arguing in favor of making the blog dumber. It’s fascinating, in a perverse way. Wingman has one goal: to get leads. If our software analytics were to indicate that our best conversion rate comes from publishing a blog post that just says the word dogshit over and over again, like this:
dogshit dogshit dogshit dogshit dogshit dogshit
dogshit dogshit dogshit dogshit dogshit dogshit
dogshit dogshit dogshit dogshit dogshit dogshit
dogshit dogshit dogshit dogshit dogshit dogshit
then Wingman would publish that post. Every day. Three times a day. Twelve times a day, if the software said twelve works better than three. It simply, truly, does not matter to him. Wingman isn’t a bad guy. He’s just a guy who has a number to hit.
My heart sinks. I’m not angry. I’m disappointed. I realize that there probably is a legitimate business to be made from churning out crappy content. But that is not something you hire the former technology editor of Newsweek to write for you.
What Wingman is really telling me is that whatever Halligan promised me, it isn’t going to happen. Part of me just wants to quit. Instead, I decide to be a good soldier and go along with Wingman’s directive. Soon I am writing articles like “What Is CRM?” and “What Is CSS?” aimed at the reading level of Marketing Mary. It’s a long way from writing features on supercomputing and artificial intelligence, or interviewing Bill Gates for Newsweek. In a way it’s humiliating. I hate to think that people who knew me will see these articles with my name on them.
I came to HubSpot with grandiose ideas about creating a new kind of corporate journalism. I was going to give speeches and write books and become a big-shot brand evangelist marketing guru. Instead, at the age of fifty-two, I’m writing lead-generation copy. In the world of publishing, lead-gen is about as low as you can go, a step down from writing copy for clothing catalogs. It’s hack work. It’s worse than what I was doing twenty-five years ago when I was toiling away in a computer industry trade magazine.
I wrack my brain trying to figure out how this has happened. Why did Halligan hire me, if they were just going to stick me over here, doing this? My theory is that Halligan wanted to hire me but he didn’t want to manage me, so he passed me off to Cranium, but Cranium wanted nothing to do with me, so he handed me off to Wingman, and Wingman realized that Cranium didn’t consider me important, so he stuck me in the content factory working under Zack and hoped I would just go away.
Wingman doesn’t want to hear my ideas about how to improve the blog by producing higher-quality articles written by real journalists. The only improvement Wingman cares about is our lead-generation number. That’s what Wingman gets paid to do. That’s how he gets measured and how he gets rewarded. He has zero incentive to change anything.
After mulling things over a bit I come up with a solution that will let us attract the audience that Halligan wants to reach without interfering with the marketing blog and Jan’s lead-generation goals. My idea is that HubSpot should create a separate, high-end publication, a new website with beautiful graphics and video elements—an online magazine—and put me in charge of it.
I write Wingman a long memo pitching him the idea. I suggest we call the magazine Inbound. I mention the idea to Tracy, the vice president who runs the brand and buzz department and organizes the annual Inbound conference. My online magazine dovetails perfectly with the conference. Tracy says she loves the idea.
Wingman waits a week and writes back saying no.
I think this is the wrong decision for the company, but it’s even worse for me. I suppose I could appeal to Cranium, but I’m pretty sure Cranium is the one who made this call. Wingman doesn’t really have a lot of autonomy. He does what Cranium tells him to do. Even if Wingman did make the decision, I doubt Cranium will overrule him.
One thing I’ve started to figure out is that the top guys, like Halligan, might really want to change things, but below them there are middle managers like Cranium and Wingman, and entrenched veterans like Marcia and Jan, and these people want nothing to do with newcomers and new ideas. They don’t want change. They like things the way things are. After all, they’re the ones who made things that way. Some of them have been here since the very early days. In their mind, HubSpot belongs to them, not to these interlopers and outsiders who are now storming into the place and writing memos and telling everybody how they should be doing their jobs. Many of these people have never worked anywhere else. A lot of them aren’t very good. But here, they’re in charge. And I’m stuck working under them.
Eight
The Bozo Explosion
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. As Guy Kawasaki, who worked with Jobs at Apple, puts it: “B players hire C players, so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players.” That’s the bozo explosion, and that’s what I believe has happened at HubSpot in the course of the last seven years.
“How weird are you, on a scale from one to ten?” is an actual question that HubSpot’s twenty-something managers ask job candidates during interviews, according to reviews posted on Glassdoor, a website for job seekers. Also: “What does your desk look like? Wh
at would you put on it?”
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. Shrinks call this the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after two researchers from Cornell University whose studies found that incompetent people fail to recognize their own lack of skill, grossly overestimate their abilities, and are unable to recognize talent in other people who actually are competent.
Cranium is a classic example. He was one of the first five employees at HubSpot, and in his mind, HubSpot is a huge, important company. He sends us emails telling us that HubSpot has the best marketing team in the world, and claiming that the biggest companies in Silicon Valley are jealous of us. This is insane. I’ve spent years covering Silicon Valley, and before coming to HubSpot I’d never heard of the company.
The thing is, Cranium isn’t lying. He’s brainwashed. Better yet, he has brainwashed himself. He has mixed his own Kool-Aid and drunk too much of it. Cranium joined in 2007 and is considered almost a co-founder of the company. It turns out that Cranium’s father is a Boston venture capitalist and was once a top sales executive at a software company called Parametric Technology Corp., or PTC. Parametric is where Halligan cut his teeth as a sales guy when he first got out of college. Basically, Halligan worked with Cranium Senior, and later, when Halligan started HubSpot, he hired Cranium Junior to run marketing. Cranium didn’t have a lot of experience at the time, but he came with a bonus: money to invest. Crunchbase, a website that tracks venture capital investments, lists Cranium as one of three participants in HubSpot’s Series A round of funding in 2007, the year he joined the company.
Cranium believes he is a marketing genius. He has people surrounding him who believe that, too. But sometimes I wonder if Cranium knows what he’s doing. One of his ploys to get attention involves publishing an article on Mashable, a technology news site, with the provocative headline 10 REASONS WHY I IGNORED YOUR RESUME. In the article Cranium makes fun of the awful resumes he fields in his position as a world-famous marketing superstar. Cranium says people need to proofread their resumes, catch typos, and spell things correctly—but his article contains typos, and includes a reference to the actor Will Ferrell, but misspells his name as Will Farrell.
Some readers post comments praising the article, but others savage Cranium, not only for the Will Ferrell mistake and typos, but for his snooty tone. “Would anyone want to work for HubSpot after the CMO writes something like this?” one person writes. “All the money in the world as payment would not be enough to work for this moron,” another commenter writes. “Someone has a power/ego problem,” says a third.
Cranium perceives himself as being skilled at recruiting and hiring, yet turnover in his department is so high that people in other parts of HubSpot refer to the marketing department as “the French Revolution.” People are constantly being hired and fired, or “graduated,” as Cranium says in his emails to the group. I keep making friends, only to have them disappear.
These “graduations” sometimes happen suddenly, with no warning. In my second week at HubSpot I have lunch with a woman named Bettina. She’s right out of college, working in her first job, and wants to write a book about marketing to Millennials. That night everyone in the department gets an email saying Bettina has “graduated” and will not be back in the morning. I email Bettina and ask why she never mentioned this at lunch. She tells me she didn’t know. Her boss just fired her, out of the blue, and told her to never come back. Usually, Cranium has other people do the firing for him, and he typically does not speak to the “graduates,” even in cases where the person being fired has spent years working in his department.
Before my time, Cranium created a weekly video podcast called HubSpot TV, starring himself and a co-host. The show streamed live, every Friday afternoon. I can’t imagine many people outside HubSpot actually watched it. Cranium didn’t care! He and his co-host kept doing the podcast for four years and recorded 225 episodes. Those videos still exist online someplace. They are like a real-life version of the comedy done by Ricky Gervais in the British version of The Office, where the goal is not so much to make you laugh as to make you feel uncomfortable. You wish it would stop, but you can’t look away.
Wingman is Cranium’s right-hand man, his trusty sidekick, the Robin to his Batman. Wingman’s experience before coming to HubSpot consists of a few years doing low-level jobs in PR agencies. In 2010, while working at one of those jobs, he co-authored a book called The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar. The implication was that Wingman, then age twenty-six, had achieved marketing superstardom himself and wanted to help others emulate his success. He now bills himself as a “marketing author and speaker.”
Like Cranium, Wingman believes HubSpot is an extraordinary place. One month when the blog team almost but not quite hits its latest insane lead-generation goal, Wingman sends around this email: “You all are amazing. I know the work you do is extremely hard, but we are on the verge of doing something legendary. Take a step back and look at what you are building [sic] is a rare thing.”
Twice during my time at HubSpot I try to bring in job candidates. Both are in their fifties. One was the founding editor of one of the biggest business news websites in the world and then became a vice president of global digital marketing for a multinational computer firm that did tens of billions of dollars in annual sales. The other is a woman who has spent eighteen years at Time Inc., working on both the editorial and the business sides of the organization. She managed hundreds of people and was responsible for a multimillion-dollar budget.
The woman from Time takes the train up from New York to Boston and spends a day being interviewed by various people on the content team, including one woman who is less than a year out of college. The content factory workers come back saying they are not impressed. The veteran marketing guy meets Wingman for lunch and follows up by sending a detailed plan for how HubSpot can expand its business. Wingman never even acknowledges the email. The marketing guy gets hired as VP of marketing at a different software company. The Time Inc. woman becomes a producer for a major cable news network.
So it goes. Cranium and Wingman have surrounded themselves with people who are younger than they are and have even less experience, but who are loyal. Jordan and Holly are two of Cranium’s favorites and were among his first hires. They are Level 8 Operating Thetans, and can do whatever they want.
Jordan is twenty-eight years old, was hired in 2007, straight out of college, and now manages a dozen direct reports. Holly was hired in 2008, also directly from college, and has a small team under her. In addition, Holly has put herself in charge of making parody videos that are meant to promote the HubSpot brand but don’t always help the company. “Watching this video gave me cancer” is how one commenter reviews one of Holly’s productions, a parody of “What Does the Fox Say?” called “What Does the Web Say?” Says another: “After watching this video I gouged out my eyes and shoved knitting needles in my ears so I would never have to endure it again.” The video is so bad that one of HubSpot’s engineers posts a question on the corporate wiki asking why the video was even created in the first place. Cranium defends Holly, and insists the video was a brilliant piece of marketing. A few months later, Holly strikes again, recording a video that takes “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and changes it to “All I Want for Christmas Is Leads,” with lyrics about sales and marketing. Everyone tells her it’s great.
Beneath these people lies another layer of fortified bozofication, which consists of people like Sharon, a forty-something woman who describes herself on Twitter as a “manic pixie dream girl” and calls herself a member of the management team even though she has no one reporting to her. “I manage a team of one,” she tells us one day in a department meeting, and by one she is referring to herself. She runs “influencer relations,” which means she’s supposed to identify people who influence corporate s
oftware buying decisions, and become friendly with them. One year at Halloween she gives a speech at a marketing conference while wearing a witch costume, with sparkly shoes, a broom and a big pointy black hat. She posts pictures of herself doing this on Twitter.
Marcia from the blog team, who has been at HubSpot since 2008, discovers that by changing the date or byline or some of the information in an old blog post she can trick Google into thinking the post is new, which boosts its rank in search results so it gets more traffic. She starts changing the dates on old blog posts, and writes a blog post teaching Marketing Mary how to do the same. “Historical Blog Search Engine Optimization,” she calls it.
Ashley, the youngest blogger, publishes a post titled, “Fifteen Common Grammar Mistakes We All Need to Stop Making,” in which she (a) suggests the passive voice is grammatically incorrect, and (b) claims that “e.g.” stands for “example given.” Ashley also dreams up a solution to one of Marketing Mary’s problems, which is how to come up with ideas for new blog posts. Ashley’s solution is a sort of Mad Libs generator, which she calls the Blog Topic Generator. Type in three keywords, and the BTG will spit out three headlines. The problem is that the headline ideas come from Ashley, whose preferences lean toward BuzzFeed-style lists (“15 Reasons,” “7 Ways”) and Miley Cyrus.
The idea is obviously cockeyed. A child could see that. Nevertheless, Zack allows Ashley to proceed. Zack believes that computers one day will do the work of content generation instead of humans. The BTG is just a first step, ushering in this brave new world. Ashley schedules countless meetings to “brainstorm” ideas and give us progress reports. At last, with great fanfare, Marcia, Jan, and Ashley launch the BTG. The project immediately blows up in their faces, because the BTG produces ridiculous, pointless results. A woman who runs a blog for a hospital complains in the comment section that she tried to use the BTG to generate ideas for Cervical Cancer Awareness Month and received the following:
