Amid all the job losses of the Great Recession, there is one category of worker that the economic disruption has been good for: nonhumans.
— Daniel Lyons
Hubspot's leaders were not heroes but rather a pack of sales and marketing charlatans who spun a good story about magical transformation technology and got rich by selling shares in a company that still has never turned a profit.
Most startups flame out or just muddle along. Your chances of spotting a unicorn, pre-horn, are incalculably small. But if, knowing that, you still want to toss aside your cushy job, at least listen to corporate vets who have made the transition.
Conventional companies try to find new uses for capabilities they already have. Transformers look at what the market needs and then go build it, hiring new people and/or taking people off other jobs.
Since 2011, Groupon has lost $730 million, and Zynga has lost just over $1 billion. Twitter has been in business for 10 years and went public in 2013. Since then, the company has lost $2 billion.
There's often a good, honest case to be made that a century-old company has not only a knack for growing and managing a P&L, but also, perhaps, a heart and soul.
We like the John Gruber model - he writes some long stuff that's very thoughtful and analytical, and then other stuff, he just adds a bit of commentary. I like that.
My prior stint at 'Newsweek' was a very different world. So it's what it's like to be in one of these kooky software startups as a grown up. It's not entirely pleasant! It's like, 'Oh, I don't fit.'
I wouldn't say that I know a lot about 'Silicon Valley'. I live in Boston, for one thing. And I don't live and breathe this stuff the way most of the guys out there do.
'Silicon Valley' likes being satirized. They've all been waiting for someone to come along and make fun of it.
HubSpot is divided into 'neighborhoods,' each named after a section of Boston: North End, South End, Charlestown.
I feel like there are some careers that do have a higher meaning.
I guess I always had made some assumptions about what it would be like to work in a tech company, and some were right, and some were wrong. I had a lot of, looking back on it, now naive ideas about how companies build their brands, and a lot of those notions I ended up realizing were kind of wrong.
I wanted to write a book about what it's like to be 50 and trying to reinvent yourself - that struggle. There are all these books and inspirational speakers talking about being a lifelong learner, and it's so great to reinvent yourself, the brand of you. And I wanted to say, you know, it's not like that. It's actually really painful.
I want to get in on how the media business is changing, how people are telling stories in new ways.
If your plumber or pool installer or local appliance store uses HubSpot software, HubSpot may be holding information about you without you even knowing it. We figure we're safe when we use online services. We figure we can trust the people who run them not to snoop on us. I used to believe that. I don't anymore.
There are too many ways that a startup gig can go sideways. If the startup won't agree to hefty severance, pass.
Nvidia's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, is an engineer and a chip designer. He cofounded Nvidia and still runs it like a startup.
To make a vehicle autonomous, you need to gather massive streams of data from loads of sensors and cameras and process that data on the fly so that the car can 'see' what's around it.
There was a time when a company could not sell its shares to the public unless its revenues were growing and it was turning a profit. Companies that lost money were deemed too risky for public investors.
NBC Universal has created a role called 'talent branding specialist' - a marketer whose job is essentially to put the company on the radars of the most sought-after candidates.
I feel like Valleywag has been different things with different writers over the years. Up and down. I think it's at their best when they get a legitimate scoop, like when someone leaks them documents. I feel like we could do more of that, breaking stories.
I wanted to learn how to blog, so I was playing around with Wordpress and Typepad and Blogger, starting all these different blogs just to learn how these things work. I had a fake Sergey Brin blog, an anonymous, fake Ph.D kind of blog. I did it for, like, I don't know, six weeks, and the Steve Jobs one just caught on.
The people running Silicon Valley are not making the show because they want to do a satire of Silicon Valley. They are just comedy writers, and they want to make a funny show.
Even in the business department of a magazine, tech was a backwater.
The office-as-playground trend was made famous by Google and has spread like an infection across the tech industry. Work can't just be work; work has to be fun.
I was drawn to journalism as a young guy because I felt like there was some purpose to it, not always but sometimes.
I think the issues around diversity of all kinds are really a huge problem in the startup world.
People in startup-land live inside it. They see themselves as really good people even when they're doing something that's very bad. There's a huge disconnect from reality in the tech world.
There are people who do things in tech that have the same skill sets that journalists have. They write, they edit, they put out press releases.
The world of online marketing, where HubSpot operates, though, has a reputation for being kind of grubby. Our customers include people who make a living bombarding people with email offers or gaming Google's search algorithm or figuring out which kind of misleading subject line is most likely to trick someone into opening a message.
A startup job is an investment, after all: Venture capitalists may wager money, but you're staking something more precious - your time. And unlike VCs, you can't spread your risk by betting on a bunch of companies at once. Start with TAM. That's 'total addressable market,' and if it's not big enough, there's no point in talking.
Nvidia's self-driving-car business grew out of a long-standing relationship with auto companies. Car guys used Nvidia chips for computer-aided design, then used Nvidia supercomputer chips to do crash simulations. When the car guys started thinking about autonomous vehicles, Nvidia leaped at the chance to help them solve the problem.
Why can't modern tech companies both grow and turn a profit at the same time?
Confining a resume to a single page is good advice for anyone.
GE rolled out a popular TV ad campaign in 2015 explaining why youthful techies should give the 'digital industrial' giant a second look.
My job, originally, was to write blog posts for their 'HubSpot' blog. They have a business model built on content. Then I was writing e-books for them, and after I came back from L.A., they had this new plan to launch a podcast.
I was working at 'Forbes,' and I covered big enterprise companies - IBM, Sun, and EMC - and it was kind of boring. 'Forbes' only came out every other week, so it was not the most fast-paced job in the world. It was very nice, comfortable.
Some people don't have a sense of humor.
Every new HubSpot employee has to go through training to learn how to use the software. That's a good idea, and it also keeps me from having to worry about what I'm supposed to be doing here or why Cranium, who hired me, still has never come by to say hello or talk about what he wants me to work on.
HubSpot's offices occupy several floors of a 19th-century furniture factory that has been transformed into the cliche of what the home of a tech startup should look like: exposed beams, frosted glass, a big atrium, modern art hanging in the lobby.
There are two types of young people - the partiers and the people who wanted a sense of purpose in their life.
My role on 'Silicon Valley' was so small that I didn't have a lot of influence anyway in the show. There are four guys who really write that show and run that show and then six or eight hanging out in a room kicking in a few bits.
You realize that if you're in the media business, technology is fundamentally what's driving the change in that business.
I was a technology reporter. And I think everybody who covers tech at some point or another feels like a little kid with their face pressed against the glass looking in at the candy shop and going, 'Wow, it looks so cool and so much fun.'
