By Alec Hogg
Long before he became super-famous for antagonistic biographies on Rupert Murdoch (The Man Who Owns The News) and Donald Trump’s White House (Fire And Fury), author Michael Wolff tried his luck at a tech startup. His experiences during the Dot Com boom were chronicled in Burn Rate, a book sometimes pulled from the shelf to remind me of those crazy times.
Wolff’s first best-seller was both funny and scary. A description also apt for a book I’ve just devoured which reads like a sequel. Called Disrupted – Ludicrous Misadventures in the Tech Start-up Bubble, it shares the adventures of former Newsweek tech editor Dan Lyons.
You can’t help chuckling at lengths this retrenched 52 year old goes to when trying to fit in at a company staffed by people half his age. But scary, too, because of Hubspot’s boiler-room business model. Although brutally exposed by Lyons, its share price has doubled in the last two years. Despite growing losses ($15m in Q1) the start-up’s market cap is now over $5bn.
The peak of the Dot Com bubble came on March 10, 2000. Eight months later, internet stocks had lost three quarters of their value. The meltdown began with double digit daily declines for big names that missing over-optimistic market forecasts. Yesterday the much-hyped Facebook share price fell 18% after financial results disappointed. We have been warned.
