Disrupted

by Dan Lyons

  Now we have gone to the next level: Trotsky is using his manager voice and running through a list of things I have done wrong. Really I’ve done just one thing, and it’s just a small comment, and for that matter whatever slight or insult Spinner is claiming to have suffered, it’s nothing compared to the open battle that Trotsky and Spinner engaged in on Facebook a few months before, when he was ranting about elephants and she was accusing him of being a woman hater. That argument didn’t lead to anyone getting threatened with firing. Yet somehow my little comment, with no names mentioned, constitutes a firing offense, something that we need to spend a whole day going back and forth about, and which has put me into a hole so deep that I might never dig out.

  I’m sorry, but I’m not buying it.

  When Trotsky finishes working through his list, I say, “Okay. So what do you want me to do?”

  He doesn’t know. We’ll have to keep talking. “Do you have any questions for me?” he says.

  “Well,” I say, “the one thing that puzzles me is I kind of think you’re blowing this out of proportion. I guess the only question I would have is why you guys are making such a big deal out of this. I understand there’s extra sensitivity today because of the IPO announcement. Obviously I didn’t know that was happening. I’m sorry about the timing. But it all seems like such a small thing and I’m taken aback by the response.”

  I ask him if the HR department is going to get involved. He says he doesn’t know. They might be.

  “Are you filing an official report about this to HR?” I say. “Is all of this going to be documented somewhere, in my employee file?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “Well I’m concerned because the way you’re handling this feels like you’re starting to build some documentation that can be used to support a case for firing me. Is that what HubSpot is doing? Are you starting a file on me, a sort of paper trail that you can use later if you want to fire me?”

  That’s when Trotsky delivers a line I will never forget: “The company,” he says, “doesn’t need a reason to fire you. The company can do whatever it wants.”

  A week later, on September 2, the Tuesday after the Labor Day weekend, Trotsky forwards me an email that Cranium has sent around to everyone in the marketing department. We’re all getting an amazing gift: customized Bose QuietComfort 15 headphones.

  “Congratulations for earning your place as the best marketing team in the world,” Cranium writes. “Workday, NetSuite, Salesforce, Rackspace, LinkedIn, and Facebook all look up to you and want to do marketing like you do (all of those companies have asked me to teach them how you guys do it).” Cranium says he knows everyone is working long hours getting ready for the Inbound conference, which takes place in two weeks. “We have a lot to do and a lot of pressure. But I know you guys can do it and once again prove you’re the best marketing team in the world. With your help we can rock INBOUND, crush the product launches, and exceed our revenue goals in Q4.”

  What scares me is that I don’t think Cranium is just saying that stuff to get people whipped up. I think he really believes that he runs the best marketing team in the world, and that all of those big companies in Silicon Valley want him to come teach them about marketing.

  The headphones are painted bright orange and are customized with the HubSpot logo and each person’s last name. Cranium claims they’re a “limited edition” and worth $900. They’re incredibly tacky. No one in their right mind would wear them in public.

  “Yours are sitting here at my desk,” Trotsky writes to me.

  I’m a bit confused. A week ago Trotsky was telling me that I was on the verge of being fired, that I had dug myself into an impossibly deep hole and I had two strikes against me. I was probably also on thin ice, but he left that one out. A week ago, Trotsky was making me get on the phone so that he could dress me down in front of my children.

  Now we’re back to being pals, and he thinks I’m going to be motivated to come back to work because I’ll get a pair of Bose headphones, in orange.

  On the same day, Trotsky sends me a separate email saying he has even more big news. “You’ve got a new job,” he says. “Very high profile. Hugely important. On my team, but a new function. It’s awesome. Great way to wipe the slate clean with kick ass output. When can we talk?”

  I’m sitting in the writers’ room on the Sony lot. We’re working. It’s my last week in Los Angeles. I write back and tell him I’ll call him later in the day, but meanwhile what’s the new job? “We need to get a podcast off the ground. You will own it, entirely,” he writes.

  Doing a podcast isn’t exactly a leadership role at HubSpot, but it sounds fine to me. I know how to do a podcast. A few years ago I did a weekly podcast with a partner, and we drew a pretty good audience. I like interviewing people, and I’m not bad at it.

  “I even have a really nice professional-quality microphone,” I tell him when we get on the phone. “And some good headphones and some sound-canceling foam that I can put around the microphone. I have video stuff too if we want to do a video podcast. I know the guys at YouTube who work with the video bloggers. I can talk to them and get some advice for how to set things up. I’m thinking maybe we could do an opening segment where I riff on the news of the week in marketing, and then I can bring in a guest and do an interview.”

  There’s a pause, and then Trotsky explains that I’m not going to be the host of the podcast. The host is going to be Cranium. I am just going to be booking the guests and handling the promotion and marketing, making sure the podcasts get edited and loaded onto the iTunes Store.

  Basically, I’m going to be a secretary.

  In fact the role Trotsky is giving me is one that Cranium originally intended to give to his administrative assistant. He even paid for her to take a podcasting course.

  Now it’s my job instead. Trotsky doesn’t say that I’m going to be a secretary. He says I’m going to be the “executive producer.”

  “It’s a really big role,” he says. “It’s very high profile.”

  “Sure,” I croak. “That’s great. I can’t wait to get started.”

  An hour or so later, Trotsky sends an email telling me that the reason I am getting this highly coveted podcast secretarial job is that he vouched for me with Cranium. Cranium apparently wanted to just fire me—but Trotsky went in there and fought for me, defended me, and saved my ass.

  “I thought of this scene,” he writes, and then includes a link to a YouTube video. It’s a scene from Donnie Brasco, where Al Pacino plays a gangster and Johnny Depp plays an undercover FBI agent who has infiltrated the mob. In the YouTube clip, Pacino confronts Depp about being a rat. He says he put his reputation on the line for Depp, and if Depp turns out to be a rat, Pacino is a dead man.

  I understand the implication: Trotsky and I are gangsters. He has vouched for me with Cranium, the capo di tutti capi. If I don’t turn myself around, Trotsky’s own career is in peril. Trotsky is Lefty, the aging hit man, putting his life on the line! He’s still not sure whether he can trust me, but he wants to trust me, and he’s going to help me become a made man. And me? I’m Donnie Brasco, and I’m really an FBI agent, but now I’ve been spending so much time around these wise guys that I’m starting to become just like them. How dramatic is this!

  Or maybe we are just two dickheads working in a marketing department, and one of us wants that to seem a little less banal than it really is.

  Three days later, on Friday, September 5, and still operating in Donnie Brasco mode, Trotsky writes an email saying he needs me to make him a promise: “It’s really important that I get a clear answer on your future intentions: are you ‘all in’ with HubSpot? If I am going to give you ownership of the entire podcast program, I need to know that you are all in.”

  I write back and assure him: “I’m all in.”

  This is ridiculous. The guy has already started trying to drive me out of the company, but now he wants me to commit to being all in? What’s next? Are w
e going to prick our fingers and burn drops of blood on a picture of Saint Peter, like in The Sopranos?

  I am not really lying to him. I am all in—for now. I’ve prepared my panels for the Inbound conference. I’ve started emailing people who might be good guests for the podcast. Sure, when I find a better job, I will leave HubSpot, and I hope that happens soon, but who knows how long it will take? Until I find something else, I need a paycheck. So I will say what I’m expected to say. I’ll wear my stupid Bose headphones and be a team player.

  But the truth is that eleven days ago, when Trotsky made me get on the phone in front of my children so he could berate me—that day it was over. I should have quit right then, and I feel like a coward for not doing so. But I still remember how I felt in those months after I got laid off from Newsweek, when I was out of work and calling around, cap in hand, willing to take anything. No matter how bad things get at HubSpot, at least I’ll have money coming in. Having a job, any job, makes it easier to find another one.

  So I’ll stay, and I’ll look for another job, and I’ll try to remain on Trotsky’s good side. That’s the plan. But unfortunately before I can even return to work, Good Trotsky turns into Bad Trotsky and pounces on me again, making a huge deal out of a tiny thing and then unleashing a torrent of abuse over a manufactured pretext. This time it has to do with the Inbound show, HubSpot’s annual customer conference.

  Twenty-two

  Inbound and Down

  Inbound takes place in Boston the week of September 15, 2014, and it’s a huge deal for Hubspot—it’s our version of Dreamforce, the four-day orgy that Salesforce.com puts on every fall in San Francisco. We’re a fraction of the size of Salesforce.com, but we’re trying to flex our muscles and look big. This year the show is an especially big deal because we have just announced our IPO plans. Strictly speaking, we’re supposed to be in a “quiet period,” when the Securities and Exchange Commission requires companies to avoid doing things that might artificially pump up the price of the stock. Halligan can’t get up on stage and start telling everyone to buy shares, but let’s be honest—the timing could not be better. HubSpot is about to throw a party for ten thousand adoring fans and customers just before its management team launches a road show where Halligan and Shah, along with their bankers, will pitch to institutional investors.

  Inbound is a way to demonstrate HubSpot’s market momentum. But also—and I’m sure the top management of HubSpot realizes this—the ten thousand people who attend the show are exactly the kind of people who will buy HubSpot’s stock when it starts trading. These are our customers and business partners, they’re part of the movement, and they feel an almost religious devotion to the company. Better yet, most of them don’t know anything about investing. They don’t know how to read a prospectus, or scrutinize an income statement or a balance sheet. All they know is that they love Brian Halligan and love Dharmesh Shah, and those guys are up on stage telling them that business is booming, HubSpot is growing like crazy, and everything is awesome.

  Cranium knows that he has to go big this year, and he has pulled out all the stops. He’s splurged and hired Malcolm Gladwell and Martha Stewart as featured speakers, along with Guy Kawasaki, an author and former Apple marketing “evangelist” who is a big name in the marketing world. This year’s show is so big that HubSpot has been forced to move from the Hynes Convention Center in the Back Bay to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, a bigger venue. Janelle Monáe, an R&B singer, has been hired to perform at a party.

  Inbound also marks my return to HubSpot after my leave of absence. I’ve been helping out with the show even from Los Angeles. I’ve convinced a producer from Silicon Valley to come give a presentation about the show. I’m moderating a panel of venture capitalists, including three who are members of HubSpot’s board of directors. I’ve also persuaded the head of a public relations agency in New York to do a presentation with me where we will offer tips about how companies can deal with the press. The PR woman, Julia, is a friend of mine.

  The week before Inbound, Julia emails me and says she’s never heard anything from HubSpot about her travel arrangements. Do we still want her to come? The last I knew, Trotsky was going to take care of this. I figure it’s just an oversight. The two women who handle logistics for the conference probably forgot. I assure her that I’ll take care of it.

  Monica and Eileen are the organizers. I write and tell them that Julia needs a plane ticket up from New York and a hotel room the night before her talk.

  Monica says nobody ever asked them to make arrangements for Julia.

  “This should have been done ages ago,” I respond.

  She says it’s too late to do anything about this now. There are no hotel rooms available in Boston, and, anyway, HubSpot doesn’t cover travel costs for speakers like Julia.

  I’ve never heard of anything like this. I’ve given dozens of speeches all around the world, and nobody has ever asked me to pay for my own travel. Booking a room and a plane ticket seems like the least you can do when you ask someone to come give a talk at your event.

  But this is HubSpot. We do things our own way. Our company is so cool that people will pay to get coveted speaking spots at our conference. I tell Monica and Eileen that I’ll just pass word to Julia that she will have to pay for her own airfare. If she needs a place to stay, I will offer to put her up in the guest room at my house.

  Julia is appalled and cancels. She sends an email saying we seem to have gotten our wires crossed, and she wishes everyone the best and hopes they have a great conference.

  Monica and Eileen have started cc’ing Spinner and Trotsky on our messages. Spinner leaps in and says she will try to make things right with Julia. Then Trotsky jumps in, too, commenting in the thread that we’re all on. Separately, he writes an email just to me, telling me I’m being hostile and aggressive, and that I need to cool down. He says my email messages have deeply offended Monica and Eileen. They’ve been working really hard on the conference, and now I’ve started berating them.

  I think Trotsky’s assessment of the situation is way off, but I nonetheless send a fawning, groveling email to Monica and Eileen, saying I’m sorry if I have caused them problems and I know how hard they are working on the show, and I’m sure we can make things right.

  I send a copy of the apology to Trotsky so he can see what I wrote. He throws the apology back in my face. It’s no good, he says. No apology will ever make up for how I have behaved toward these women.

  What else can I do, I ask Trotsky. He says there’s nothing.

  “That ship has sailed,” he says. “You’ve alienated them. There’s no way you’re ever going to make things right with them.”

  Trotsky is making a big deal out of nothing, just like the thing with my little comment on Facebook about Spinner demanding a correction. He goes on and on, telling me that I’m a lousy person, that now I have dug myself into an even deeper hole. Instead of earning my way back into the good graces of the company, I’m making things worse.

  I show these emails—my own and Trotsky’s—to a friend who has been a C-level executive at a tech company. I ask her to be honest. I know I can be blunt sometimes, and even rude. Maybe I used a tone with Monica and Eileen that’s not appropriate in a corporate setting. My friend assures me that my emails were fine. But she is shocked by the harangues I’m getting from Trotsky. Trotsky is a loose cannon, she says. His emails are over the top and abusive, unprofessional and unacceptable. No boss should communicate to an employee in this way, she says.

  I tell her about what happened in Los Angeles, with the email from Trotsky asking why I wanted to work at HubSpot, then the harassment he delivered over that tiny joke on Facebook, and his warnings about me being as close to fired as you can get. I tell her that I suspect Trotsky is just trying to make me miserable and drive me out of the company.

  “You could go to HR and report him,” she says. “Show them the emails he’s sending you.”

  “I know,” I say, �
�but I don’t know if I trust HR. My guess is they won’t do anything to Trotsky, but they’ll tell him that I complained, and that will only piss him off even more. He’ll ramp up the harassment.”

  “So try to talk to him,” my friend suggests. “You guys were friends at one point, right? You don’t have to make a big deal of out of it. Just say hey, maybe we can get a coffee and clear the air and do a kind of reset. Keep it casual.”

  It could be that Trotsky is just stressed out. The IPO has everyone on edge. Everyone is under pressure to make sure things go well at Inbound. In addition, Trotsky’s wife just had a baby. Maybe he’s not getting much sleep and his nerves are frayed.

  In the end, Inbound goes well. Julia flies up for the day, and she’s terrific on stage and lovely to everyone. I moderate a panel with a bunch of HubSpot board members, who thank me afterward for doing a great job. I feel like I’ve redeemed myself.

  The week after Inbound, when we all get back to the office, I stop by Trotsky’s desk and ask him if we could grab a coffee at some point and have a talk about how things have been going.

  “My calendar is online,” he snaps. “Go find a time that works and send me a calendar invite.”

  At the appointed date and time, we set out for Starbucks but end up taking a long walk around a little canal near the office. Trotsky tells me he’s unhappy at HubSpot. Cranium is riding him, hard. The IPO is looking like a bust. He only took this job because he wanted to make a score on the stock. Word is that HubSpot is trying to price the shares in the range of $19 to $21. That’s above the strike price that Trotsky and I both have—our options are priced at $13. But Trotsky says it’s not enough.