Most of the positive things I read about company cultures, the "best places to work" lists, the glowing pieces on the founders, the TechCrunch articles, the phony Glassdoor reviews, are infinitely more self-aggrandizing fluff PR pieces than anything Lyons has written. No doubt about it, he's promoting his book and his show, but I'm glad some other sides of the story are being told.
It's maybe useful not to confuse specific criticisms of HubSpot with more general criticisms of the culty stage-managed hyper-enthusiasm that surrounds startup culture in general.
Just because someone is earning $150k doesn't mean they're not being sweated and exploited. To its owner, an expensive machine is still just a machine, and not an equal partner.
The tell is always the quality and genuineness of the relationships between employees and owners. It's completely possible for owners to take a genuine interest in the welfare of employees, and to see them as colleagues instead of productive units to be sweated.
But this may not happen as much as it should. And the boilerplate puppies-on-adderall always-crushing-it change-the-world so-very-excited incredible-journey rhetoric turns out to be an excellent smoke screen for owners who have no interest in anything except personal gain - and aren't even slightly concerned if they leave a trail of human wreckage behind them.
And even if you start off wanting to be a humane founder, there's no guarantee investors will let you run your company like that.
So it's easy to criticise Lyons for playing to the gallery with his book. But that doesn't mean that what he's playing is an improvised fiction.
