HubSpot CTO Dharmesh Shah has responded to Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, a memoir by business journalist Dan Lyons that exposes the gory details of life at a startup.
In the book, Lyons details the startup’s bizarre corporate culture and unselfconscious approach to running a workplace detailing things such as the company’s motto, 1+1=3, and how the word “graduations” are used when people quit or are fired.
Rather than trash the book, HubSpot put a positive spin on the whole ordeal and discussed “some of the lessons learned” and attempts “to answer some of the questions that we know are swirling around.” Here is an except from Shah’s LinkedIn post:
We were upset when we first read the book. We wish the book hadn’t been so harsh towards individual people from the HubSpot team. They are smart, hard-working and caring people that didn’t deserve it. But negative emotions have a relatively short half-life with us. Our emotions have been dissipating quickly and we think they’ll asymptotically trend towards zero over time. Besides, life is too short to hold grudges.