The orange penises are a bad omen.
It is April 15, 2013, Dan Lyons’s first day at HubSpot, a digital marketing company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a lot of hype and a decent chance of going public. A journalist by trade, Lyons has recently been laid off by Newsweek and, after a blog-editing stint, is joining HubSpot in hopes of cashing in on the startup gold rush he has spent so much time writing about. His job title, “marketing fellow,” is not impressive, but at least it’s academic-sounding, and Lyons was pleasantly surprised by his interviews with HubSpot’s chief marketing officer, pseudonym Cranium, and its founders, MIT graduates Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.
But now it’s the big day, and Lyons finds himself waiting at HubSpot’s front desk while a baby-faced receptionist makes call after call in search of someone, anyone, to come retrieve this middle-aged man claiming to be a new employee. Lyons, 52, looks around, at the orange walls and orange desks, at the uniformly 20-something HubSpotters with their orange T-shirts and orange laptop stickers, at the ubiquitous HubSpot logo, a circle with three knobbed arms meant to resemble an orange sprocket. “I have no idea what the sprocket is meant to convey, nor do I know if anyone realizes that the three arms with bulbous tips look like three little orange dicks,” Lyons writes in Disrupted: My Misadventure in The Start-Up Bubble. “These orange cocks are all over the place.”
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