by Dan Lyons
I go to the meeting with Trotsky. He plunks down a stack of paperwork with a cover letter that says I’ve been terminated, effective immediately, signed by the director of “people operations.” I have ninety days to exercise my vested stock options, or they will expire. My pay ends today. My health coverage ends in a week. So much for all that stuff about being lovable and remarkable and HubSpotty, and treating people with HEART.
Trotsky says the company can offer me something a little better. I can keep my insurance through the end of December, and I can even continue to get paid for those weeks, but only if I sign a “release and waiver of claims” agreement that’s attached to the termination letter. Signing the release form prohibits me from ever bringing any kind of legal claim against the company. It also includes a nondisparagement clause.
I tell Trotsky I want to take the paperwork home and look it over, and maybe have someone review it for me.
“Sure,” he says. “That’s fine.”
He asks me a few questions about the podcast and where things stand. There’s something I need to look up, so I open my laptop and start to search for the file—but he stops me.
“I’m not supposed to let you do that,” he says.
Trotsky takes my laptop. He also takes my ID bracelet. I’m speechless. I really can’t believe this. I gave these guys six weeks of notice and wanted to make a smooth transition, and in exchange for that courtesy, they’re firing me.
Before we leave Trotsky says he wants to tell me something: “I’m your friend,” he says. “I’ve always been your friend. I know that right now you don’t think that’s the case. You think I’ve been out to get you. But the truth is that I’ve always been on your side, and I still am.”
He also gives me some advice. He says that in his last two jobs he clashed with his managers. He left feeling angry. But in both cases, after he calmed down a bit, he reached out and tried to make amends with them. One boss refused to talk to him. The other met him for coffee and Trotsky believes they patched things up.
“No matter how angry you are right now, you should take a little time, and then reach out and try to make things right,” he says. “If someone says no, well, fine, at least you made the effort. You’ve taken the high road.”
I’m not sure which people he thinks I need to apologize to. He says Spinner is one example. I should reach out to her, ask her to have coffee, try to repair our relationship. I get the sense that he’s also talking about my relationship with him. His idea seems to be that I should go home and cool off, and then at some point reach out and apologize to him.
This is nuts. This guy has just spent three months harassing and abusing me, and now he’s handing me paperwork that cancels my health insurance in a week—and he wants me to know that he’s my friend? He wants me to make an effort to be nice to him in the future? I really don’t know how to respond to that.
“So what do we do now? Am I supposed to go talk to someone in HR?” I say. “They emailed me and said someone was going to set up a time for me to do an exit interview.”
“Do you want to go to HR?” he says.
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?”
Trotsky says the conversation we’re having right now can serve as my exit interview. He says he asked HR to let him be the one to give me the paperwork and explain everything to me, because we’re friends.
“But if you want to go talk to HR as well, we can do that,” he says.
I think about it for a moment, then decide that if there is no need for me to go to HR, then I’ll just leave.
We go back to our desks. I get my coat and backpack. Trotsky puts my laptop on his desk.
It’s mid-morning on a Friday, but there aren’t many people working in my area. I wonder if the room has been cleared out. This is something HubSpot does when they fire an employee, presumably to let the person save face. They did it to Paige, when they fired her on Fearless Friday.
On my way out I walk past Tracy, the vice president of brand and buzz, the woman who supposedly refused to give me a performance review. She gives me a big smile and wishes me all the best.
Trotsky walks out to the lobby with me, and we ride the elevator down to the first floor. I shake his hand, and say, “Thanks for everything.”
I start for the men’s room. Trotsky stands there.
“What is it,” I say. Then it dawns on me. “Do you need to make sure that I actually leave the building? Are you going to wait here while I go to the bathroom?”
That is, in fact, what he is probably supposed to do. He seems embarrassed. He says no, I can go to the bathroom unsupervised. That’s the last time I see him.
I never sign the nondisparagement and nondisclosure exit paperwork. But I do manage to negotiate a better severance agreement. The company agrees to keep paying me through the end of the year and to continue my health insurance coverage. Halligan and Dharmesh send me nice email messages thanking me for my service. Cranium says nothing.
It seems shabby and half-assed that I never got a real exit interview and that Cranium never bothered to talk to me. I don’t like the way the termination letter was worded or the way Trotsky gave me the bum’s rush out of the place. Cranium’s email memo to the department, written to make it seem like I was fired, felt like a little kick in the shins on the way out the door.
But I suppose Cranium is just trying to protect the brand. At every turn, he needs to make sure that HubSpot appears to come out on top. I didn’t break up with them; they broke up with me. Or, we broke up with each other.
A few weeks later, just before Christmas, I’m home with Sasha and the kids, around dinnertime, when the doorbell rings. It’s a FedEx guy with a huge cardboard box addressed to me. The kids are all excited. What can it be? Inside the box there’s an enormous wicker picnic basket with a lid and a latch. The basket contains delicacies from Dean and DeLuca: nuts, sun-dried tomatoes, fancy cheeses, smoked meats. I’m sure it cost a fortune.
My first guess is that it’s a Christmas gift from my dad. But when I open the note I find that the basket comes from Cranium—the guy who in nearly two years never held a one-on-one meeting with me, who had just spent the past few months, through a proxy, making my life miserable, and who, when I did finally leave, did not bother to speak to me in person, call me on the phone, or even send me an email.
The note says Cranium is happy for me and wishes me well as I return to the media business.
Trotsky, meanwhile, starts reaching out, sending me email messages asking me if I will meet him for coffee. I wonder if this is all still part of some game he is playing. Maybe he got off on tormenting me, and he misses it. He’s hoping I will keep playing along. We can go have lunch and hang out, and for a while he’ll be nice, and then he’ll turn on me again, and he’ll see how much I will tolerate.
For a while I ignore his messages. In early January he emails me again, saying, “You’ve unfollowed me on Twitter, blocked me on Facebook, and haven’t replied to email. I get that things weren’t great after you returned from LA, but I would like to talk.” He says we can bury the hatchet, or if I just need to vent, he’ll sit and listen. If I don’t want to talk to him at all, “that’d be a shame, but I’ll respect it. I always liked you, considered you a friend. It’d be unfortunate if… if… if poof, that’s all over because we didn’t find a professional groove after your return.”
This time I write back: “Hey! Great to hear from you. I’ve been crazy busy. Hope you had great holidays and will enjoy 2015!”
A few weeks later, I publish a blog post announcing that I’m writing a book about my time at HubSpot. I never hear from Trotsky again.
Epilogue
A few weeks after I delivered a first draft of this book manuscript to my publisher, things took a weird, dark turn. On July 29, 2015, late in the afternoon, HubSpot issued a press release announcing that Wingman had been promoted to chief marketing officer.
Buried in the second paragraph was a bombshell: Wingman had
been promoted because HubSpot had fired its longtime CMO, Mike Volpe, the guy called Cranium in this book. Volpe was terminated for cause because he had “violated the Company’s Code of Business Conduct and Ethics” in his “attempts to procure” a manuscript of a book involving HubSpot, the release said.
Furthermore, Joe Chernov (Trotsky) had resigned from HubSpot “before the company could determine whether to terminate him for similar violations.” Brian Halligan, the CEO, had been “appropriately sanctioned” but would not be fired.
Given the very public manner in which Volpe was fired and Chernov left the company, I decided to name them here. I left their nicknames intact in the main text of the book because, frankly, the fake names are a lot more memorable.
The press release did not say what Volpe and Chernov had done. It said only that HubSpot had hired an outside law firm to conduct an investigation, and that after reviewing the law firm’s report, the board had voted to fire Volpe. Also, the board had “notified the appropriate legal authorities about these matters.” The press release did not specify that the book in question was my book. It just referred to “a book involving the Company.” I figured it was my book, but I couldn’t be sure.
This kicked off a speculative whirlwind in Boston. What was the book? What did it say? What had Volpe and Chernov done? Why were legal authorities involved? Soon after the release was issued, a reporter from the Boston Globe, Curt Woodward, started calling Spinner and trying to get an interview with Halligan or Shah. When Spinner didn’t return his calls, he showed up at HubSpot headquarters and was let into the lobby. Spinner called security. Woodward was asked to leave.
The story made front-page news in the Globe the next day and was splashed across all of the local tech blogs. Most people speculated that the book in question was mine. The supposition seemed to be that Volpe and the others had engaged in some kind of hacking.
HubSpot did an abysmal job of managing the situation. “HubSpot & Crisis Communications: A Lesson in What Not to Do” was the title of a post by Maura FitzGerald, who runs Version 2.0 Communications, a public relations agency in Boston. The crisis itself made HubSpot “look like an arrogant, cowboy culture rather than a company that has been thoughtfully built to last,” but the way HubSpot handled the crisis “reinforced the negatives and did little to halt damage to the brand,” FitzGerald wrote.
The first mistake was HubSpot’s press release, with its headline about Wingman being appointed CMO, which looked like a clumsy attempt to put a positive spin on a situation that could only be viewed as a world of shit. Someone, presumably Spinner, must have argued that putting the “good news” first somehow would soften the impact of the bad news. Instead it made the company look sneaky.
Next was the way HubSpot dealt with the local press. Spinner seemed to think HubSpot could just brazen it out: Put out a press release, then stonewall. Refuse to answer questions. She should have had a director or executive cued up, prepped, and ready to give interviews. Instead, she called security and had a reporter bounced from the lobby.
When that didn’t work, Spinner made another blunder. Instead of talking to Woodward, the Globe reporter who was covering the story, Spinner called the Globe and requested they send Scott Kirsner, a contract columnist who is not a Globe staffer and who has been cozy with HubSpot. Companies in the midst of a crisis don’t usually enjoy the luxury of choosing which reporters will cover the story, but apparently the Globe acceded to Spinner’s demand and sent Kirsner.
Kirsner wears kooky bright green eyeglasses and is involved with a company that runs tech conferences, including some events where HubSpot executives have been speakers. One HubSpot employee serves as an advisor to that company. Kirsner tagged his articles about the scandal with a disclosure outlining his potential conflicts of interest.
Even with Kirsner assigned to the story, Halligan and Shah would not answer questions or explain what had happened. Halligan said the board had uncovered some “fishiness” and some “really aggressive tactics.” He wouldn’t say what those tactics were or who engaged in them.
The first principle of crisis communications is that if you have bad news to divulge, you do it quickly and completely. HubSpot did the opposite. The vague press release, the handpicked journalist, and the refusal to say what happened all reeked of a cover-up. The response to the crisis raised new questions. Why had HubSpot been so worried about the book? Was there some dark secret they didn’t want people to know about?
For a few days, the story remained front-page news. I was deluged with calls and emails from reporters. Kirsner entreated me to talk to him, writing, “You are missing the greatest publicity opportunity of all time.” Friends started calling, too, wanting to know what happened. The problem was I had no idea. All I knew was what HubSpot had said in its press release, which wasn’t much. I didn’t respond to any of the reporters. I figured it was best to just keep quiet and hope that eventually the facts would come out.
HubSpot alumni have a Facebook page, and oddly enough, sentiment there was that Volpe was a great guy and should not have been fired, and that I was a jerk for writing a “tell-all” book. The company’s own board of directors had fired Volpe and “notified appropriate legal authorities” yet these people simply refused to believe this could be true. They had left the company but still remained brainwashed.
Someone started a #teamvolpe hashtag thread on Twitter, trying to gin up support for this disgraced executive, but only about a dozen people posted tweets taking his side. Among those who expressed support for Volpe was Dharmesh Shah, who posted messages on Twitter and LinkedIn saying in essence that Volpe was a good person who had done a bad thing. Kirsner, the chummy columnist who interviewed Halligan and Shah for the Globe, wrote an article quoting local marketing people saying Volpe was great. Kirsner also quoted HubSpot employees, speaking anonymously, saying bad things about me. In addition, Kirsner posted a tweet that seemed to excuse Volpe’s behavior: “Q for you: if an employee had signed a confidentiality agreement, then wrote a book about your co, would you try to prevent its publication?”
The stuff about a confidentiality agreement was a smokescreen. HubSpot requires new hires to sign a document saying you can’t divulge trade secrets or confidential information, but my book doesn’t contain any of those. For that matter, people write books about their work experience all the time. Focusing on a confidentiality agreement was an attempt to distract attention from the real issue, which was that a set of top executives at a publicly traded company had done something that their own board thought might rise to the level of criminal behavior.
HubSpot wasn’t the first tech company to get caught doing something ugly. In 2006 Hewlett-Packard was discovered to have spied on reporters. The scandal led to the resignation of Hewlett-Packard’s board chairman and general counsel, and to hearings before Congress where people invoked the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. One Hewlett-Packard board member quit the board in disgust after learning what had gone on.
In 2014 there was a huge outcry after an executive at Uber made a comment about being able to investigate a journalist named Sarah Lacy. Uber looked like a pack of thugs. The media frenzy went on for weeks and was covered on national television.
Yet here were HubSpot’s top executives doing something that their own board believed might be illegal—and nobody seemed to care. Nobody was outraged that a billion-dollar company might have hacked into a journalist’s computer or broken into his house. Wall Street didn’t care either. In the days after the announcement, HubSpot’s stock price sagged a little bit but remained close to its all-time high.
At first I thought the whole thing was hilarious. What a pack of buffoons! Presumably they had engaged in some kind of hacking and got caught. The episode only served to confirm my depiction of them. To be sure, I also was angry, and in the case of Chernov somewhat disappointed, since we had at one time been friends. I also felt a sense of schadenfreude as I remembered how poorly Chernov and Volpe had
treated me. “These guys will never work again,” a former HubSpot executive said to me. “You realize that, right? Their careers are over.”
Although at first I found the whole thing comical, over the next week I started to get scared. Stuck in my head was one phrase Halligan used with the Globe: “really aggressive tactics.”
The original HubSpot press release said Volpe had been engaged in “attempts to procure” the book. I tried to parse that language. Did “attempts” mean they had tried to get the book but failed? How had they tried? How had they been caught? The word procure might imply a transaction involving money. Had they tried to bribe someone at the publishing company? If so, whatever happened might not have involved me at all.
Most speculation seemed to be that HubSpot had tried to hack my computer. Over the summer my laptop had been having problems. It was a four-year-old MacBook Air, and I had thought the hard drive might be failing. Now I wondered if perhaps it had been hacked.
Other strange things had happened. On June 21 I received a warning from Twitter that someone had been trying, unsuccessfully, to log into my account with an incorrect password. In August I got a warning from Google that someone had tried to log on to one of my Gmail accounts: “Someone has your password,” the message said. The hacker had used the correct password but the log-in attempt had come from Germany, and Google’s system had flagged it as possibly not legitimate. In August my dad received a strange email from a “fakestevejobs” email account that wasn’t mine, but the message contained a list of names from my contacts, with each person’s phone number and email address, as if someone had cracked into my contact list and was sending messages to people on that list. Toward the end of June I had received an email from a friend asking if I had remained on good terms with people at HubSpot, because “I happen to know they are keeping an eye on your Facebook activity.” This friend said that Chernov somehow was aware of what I was posting on Facebook, even though I had blocked Chernov fram seeing my posts.
