Silicon Valley – couldreads

If populating your novel with unlikable main characters can be considered a bold move, then Tony Tulathimutte is a downright badass. Cory, Linda, Will and Henrik—the four pseudo-friends at the center of Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens—are some of the least likable contributions to fiction that I’ve ever come across.

Tulathimutte’s first novel, PC is a quarter-life crisis saga blended with a send-up of Silicon Valley, specifically 2007 Silicon Valley, when the influx of tech capital was just starting to turn insidious. Cory is a disaffected nonprofit worker, on the front lines of the chasm between heady liberalism and tangible altruism, who can’t help but preach about the perils of [insert cause here] to her uninterested friends. Linda is a party girl turned addict, hamstrung in her life goals by an aggravating combination of pride and inertia. Will is a successful Asian computer programmer with a complex about being Asian and a computer programmer. And Henrik is a bumbling bipolar mess, vaguely tolerable only by virtue of how awful everyone else is.

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.”

Tag: Silicon Valley

Everyone in Private Citizens is the freaking worst

Disrupted is a Silicon Valley spinoff waiting to happen