Quick thoughts on sneak peek of new book “My Year in Startup Hell’

Just noticed a friend post this Fortune article with a sneak peek into a new book by noted author/journalist/screen-writer Dan Lyons: My Year in Startup Hell.

Check here: http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/

I didn’t want to enter this fray…partly because I don’t have the details, and partly because there is likely no one perfect POV on this. But sharing my 2 cents now because this is an important conversation.

Startups today have indeed seemed to shift much in the direction of looking and feeling a bit like frat-houses (happened just as we saw startups migrate from suburbia to city centers — from Route 128 to Cambridge, and from the Bay Area to SF). To that extent, Dan is dead on, and the tech sector needs to improve on that front quickly. But it feels to me that HubSpot may have been painted here in an exaggerated negative manner to tell a story.

I encourage those who are interested in Dan Lyons’ book to meet Dharmesh and Brian (founders of HubSpot). I don’t believe they started this company to fool around. This company may not be finding a cure for cancer, but it believes in its mission to improve marketing, sales and communication for small and medium businesses. It’s a technology enabled services business, trying to automate parts of its job along the way to improve margins. Is that a ‘change the world’ idea? I don’t think so. But is it worthy of an amazing startup success story? Yes.

I expected some real revelations in this much talked about book. And I look forward to reading it in full. But this excerpt shows the author is someone who may have spent much of his career in traditional offices where jobs meant individual reporters on the beat or on their desk. Nothing wrong with that…but a team-based culture typically requires establishing some new norms and processes, especially if an organization has to grow fast like HubSpot expected to, and did. I would totally believe that it was a very different set up than news organizations, and the author was surprised. Did HubSpot make their work environment ‘too much’ fun? I don’t know but I visited their offices a few times a few years ago and I didn’t see such things. But that’s anecdotal. May be silly things happened at a company with many young employees, but knowing the founders a bit I find it hard to believe they would condone any of it. HubSpot should aspire to do better and hopefully better processes related to HR are in place now.

But this does feel a bit like ‘The Social Network’ (movie) interpretation of Facebook. I don’t believe FaceBook was founded by boys to meet girls and have sexcapades in a CA home office. Maybe I am wrong…but I meet founders every day, and they put too much at risk when they start companies to just fool around. Many of them can learn to be better executives, but they’re generally not idiots out for a good time without a concern for their employees, customers, investors, or society at large. There are exceptions, there are assholes, and I hope to (a) stay away from them, and (b) be a good investor and Board member to prevent such things from happening in my portfolio companies.

Always learning.