我在初创公司里的糟糕经历

如果你打算拍摄一部电影，记录一位失业在家，已到知天命之年，但看上去还是很冒失的家伙，刚刚获得一次“再就业”机会的情景，开场应该是这样的：4月份的一个星期一早晨，阳光明媚，气候凉爽宜人，和风吹拂着马萨诸塞州坎布里奇市的查尔斯河。主人公走进镜头，他满头白发，留着过时的发型，戴一副牛角框眼镜，上身穿一件领子上带纽扣的衬衫。他把自己那辆斯巴鲁傲虎开进停车场，手心出了点汗。停好车后，他抓起厚重的笔记本电脑包，朝一栋年代久远的红砖建筑正门走去。这栋建筑经过翻新，外观看上去闪闪发光。那一天是2013年4月15日，这个人就是我。那是我第一天去HubSpot公司上班，它也是我获得的第一份非媒体工作。

HubSpot公司占据了好几层楼。这个办公场所原本是一栋可追溯至19世纪的家具工厂，现已被改造成一家科技初创公司经典模样：暴露在外的横梁，磨砂玻璃，巨大的中庭，大厅里悬挂着现代艺术作品。乘电梯上到三楼时，我既紧张又有些兴奋。直到那一刻，我仍然不敢相信自己竟然得到了这份工作。9个月前，我被纽约《新闻周刊》杂志毫无征兆地扫地出门。当时我担心自己可能再也找不到工作了。而现在，我即将进入东海岸最热门的科技初创公司之一，成为营销团队的一员。这家软件公司创建了一个“集客式营销”平台——与“推播式营销”（传统广告）不同，该平台通过博客、社交媒体和其他内容帮助公司吸引客户。只是有一个小问题：我对市场营销一窍不通。不过，面试我的招聘官似乎并不在乎这一点。但我还是不那么确定。

不过，我记得HubSpot对于我的加入似乎非常兴奋，这让我稍稍有点安心。公司首席营销官“头盖骨”（这是我给他起的绰号），在HubSpot博客里写了一篇宣布我加盟的博文。一众科技博客随后刊发了我，一个52岁的《新闻周刊》记者，离开媒体行业加入软件公司的故事。

接待我的是一个名叫扎克的家伙。他说，很抱歉“头盖骨”今天不在公司，然后领我参观了一下办公室。扎克看上去只有二十来岁。他一脸友善的笑容，头发打了发胶。他让我想起《新闻周刊》杂志社那些刚刚大学毕业，负责为作者们进行背景调查的实习生。我想他肯定是某个人的助理。

这家公司的办公室与我孩子在蒙特梭利上的幼儿园有着惊人的相似之处：大量使用亮丽的基本色，各种玩具，一间午睡室，里面有一张吊床，墙上是有催眠作用的棕榈树壁画。在谷歌的带动下，这种将办公室装饰成游乐场的趋势像传染病一样，风靡整个科技行业。工作不单纯是工作；工作还必须有趣。HubSpot被划分成多个“社区”，每一个社区都用波士顿一个街区命名：北区，南区，查尔斯镇等。有个社区还配有一套乐器，供人们举办即兴爵士乐演奏会，不过扎克说，公司还从未有人这样做过。每一个社区都配有一间小厨房，里面有自动咖啡机，休息室区域配有长沙发和黑板墙，人们在黑板上写下各种留言，比如“HubSpot = 酷”，也有一些激励性的信息，例如“我们有两只耳朵，但只有一张嘴，所以应该多听少说。”

一楼有一个巨大的会议室兼游戏室，游戏室必备的桌式足球、乒乓球桌、室内推圆盘游戏和视频游戏等一样不缺。隔壁餐厅里配有工业用冰箱，里面装满了啤酒，橱柜里有百吉饼和麦片，一面墙上摆满了各种玻璃容器，里面装着坚果和糖果。这面墙被称为“糖果墙”，扎克解释说，这是HubSpot的员工尤其引以为豪的地方。他们会向所有参观者首先介绍这面墙。这是一个年轻的地方，处处充满活力。团队会经常到户外玩弹簧床躲避球、卡丁车比赛和激光枪战。

几条狗在HubSpot的走廊闲逛——就像类似幼儿园的装饰一样，养狗也是科技初创公司的惯例。扎克告诉我说，每天中午总有一群员工在二楼大厅做俯卧撑。楼上有一个地方可以干洗衣服。有时候，公司还会聘请按摩师为员工提供按摩服务。在二楼有淋浴间，专为骑自行车上下班的员工和那些利用午餐时间慢跑的员工准备。有时候，当周五的快乐时光失控的时候，它也被用作“性爱小屋”。后来我从公司前台潘妮（她是一位万事通，掌握着公司上下各种小道消息）那里得知，有一次，事情严重失控，最终迫使公司管理层不得不发出一份备忘录。她告诉我说：“是销售部门的人干的。他们真令人恶心。”

后来我还听说，在一个星期六的早上，清洁工来到公司后，在一楼男厕发现了以下物品：一堆没喝完的啤酒，一堆呕吐物，还有两条三角裤。清洁工自然不高兴。更令他们苦恼的是，有一天上午，HubSpot市场营销部门一位二十多岁的小伙子，醉醺醺地来到公司，不知因为什么原因，放火烧掉了清洁工的手推车。

所有人都聚集在宽敞开放的空间里工作，就像孟加拉国衬衫工厂的女工一样，只不过手中的工具从缝纫机换成了笔记本电脑。公司流行玩具枪战，人们从巨大的平板显示器后面开枪射击，在桌子下面匍匐和滚动。人们习惯召开站立会议甚至步行会议，即一群人一边散步，一边开会。

所有人都没有专属办公室，即使CEO也不例外。这是公司明文规定之一。每三个月，所有人需要采用一种公司版本的抢座位游戏，调换一次座位。HubSpot称其为“座椅黑客”，目的是提醒每一个人，变化是永恒的。如果需要一定的私密空间，你需要预定一间位于工作空间边缘的会议室。有些会议室以红袜队球员的名字命名，有的则以“营销明星”的名字命名——我花了一段时间才接受这种做法。有的会议室里配有豆袋椅而不是实用的办公家具，员工在开会的时候，随意地躺在椅子上，把笔记本电脑架在膝盖上。

HubSpot每一位新员工都必须接受培训，学习如何使用软件。这是个好主意。这样一来，我就不必担心自己应该在这里做什么，也不用担心为什么把我招进来的“头盖骨”还没来跟我打招呼或说明他希望我做什么。

培训在一个小房间进行。在大约两周时间里，我与另外20名新员工挤在一起听励志演讲。最开始的时候，这些内容听起来就像是邪教洗脑一样。这跟我此前对科技公司的想象一模一样，只是有过之而无不及。

我们的培训主管名叫戴维，是一位瘦长结实，精力充沛的家伙，大约四十多岁，剃着光头，留着灰色的山羊胡子。培训第一天，我们相互打招呼，进行了一番自我介绍，还给其他人讲述自己的与众不同之处。戴维的独特之处在于，他周末在一支重金属翻唱乐队表演。

戴维身兼双重角色，既是老师，又是布道者。他每两周都要培训一批新员工，每次都是同样的高谈阔论，展示相同的幻灯片，讲相同的笑话。他很擅长做这件事。他毫不掩饰地告诉我们，他喜欢HubSpot。他曾做过许多工作，HubSpot是到目前为止最棒的一家。这家公司改变了他的生活。他希望我们的生活也会因公司而改变。

戴维告诉我们：“HubSpot不仅仅是销售产品，还在引领一场革命，一场运动。HubSpot正在改变这个世界。这款软件不仅帮助公司销售产品，也在改变着人们的生活。是的，我们正在改变人们的生活。”

他讲述了一个名叫布兰登的客户的经历。布兰登是弗吉尼亚州一位游泳池安装工。他的公司面临困境，难以为继。但自从使用HubSpot软件之后，这家公司开始蓬勃发展。很快，他开始在全美各地修建游泳池。他赚了大钱！在取得巨大成功之后，布兰登聘请其他人运营这家游泳池公司，他自己则成为一名励志演说家。他在世界各地传播集客式营销的好处，改变了成千上万人的生活。

戴维说道：“这个人成了超级明星。这一切都是从HubSpot开始的。这就是我们要做的事情。你们将成为这份事业的一份子。”

事实上，我们就是在销售软件，帮助其他公司——其中多数为游泳池安装公司和花店这样的小公司——增加销量。然而，HubSpot所处的在线营销行业一直声誉不佳。公司的客户形形色色，有人以给人们发送海量电子邮件促销为生，或者投机取巧地利用谷歌的搜索算法，或者钻研哪一种误导性主题最有可能诱导人们打开信息。在线营销虽然不像网络色情那样肮脏，但也好不到哪去。

但戴维却在大肆吹捧这个行业，新员工们则频频点头，似乎极为认同他的观点。这些新员工大多刚刚走出大学校园，干净利索，清清爽爽。坐在我旁边的一个人剪着平头，刚刚从新罕布什尔的某所大学毕业。他告诉我说，他现在与父母住在一起，每天需要花一个小时来上班，不过，他正在考虑搬到距离波士顿较近的地方住。

HubSpot不止销售软件，还培训人们如何使用软件，以及如何更高效地进行在线销售。在公司年度客户大会Inbound上，成千上万名网络营销人员聚集波士顿，学习新的营销技巧。其中一条是在电子邮件中使用误导性主题，例如，“转发：你的假期计划”，以诱使人们打开信息。他们说这种做法“可以提高信息被打开的几率。”在会上，HubSpot还展示了一些新功能和产品，如一款产品可以在网站访问者的电脑中植入跟踪Cookie文件，跟踪用户访问的每一个页面。当某个人第二次访问你的网站时，这款软件甚至可以给你发送提醒——这样你便可以马上给对方打电话说：“嘿，我看到您又登录我们的网站了！我可以为您提供哪些帮助？”

这就是我们的业务：购买我们的软件，销售更多的商品。这种模式无可厚非，但进行自我宣传或描述公司业务，HubSpot并没有遵循同样的叙事方式。培训师告诉我们，我们每天发出的数十亿电子邮件并不属于垃圾邮件范畴。相反，我们将这些电子邮件描述为“受人喜爱的营销内容。”这是培训师的原话。这句话背后的逻辑关系错综复杂：“垃圾”意味着来源不明的电子邮件，而这些电子邮件的收件人均通过填写表格向我们提交了他们的联系方式，并允许我们与他们进行联系。我们的电子邮件可能不受人们欢迎，但从而严格意义上来说，它们并非来源不明的邮件，因此也就不是垃圾邮件。即便我们和客户发出了数以十亿计的电子邮件信息，但我们并不想骚扰其他人——事实上，我们试图为人们提供帮助。通过一封接一封地发送信息，每一次都采用不同的主题，我们可以发现人们的真正需求。我们在了解他们。我们在聆听他们的声音。

因此，我们并不是在创造垃圾邮件。事实上，官方的说法是，HubSpot憎恨垃圾邮件，希望杜绝垃圾邮件。我们希望保护人们免受垃圾邮件侵扰。发送垃圾邮件的都是坏人，而我们是好人。我们的邮件不是垃圾邮件。事实上，我们的邮件与垃圾邮件截然相反。我们的邮件是反垃圾邮件。它是阻挡垃圾邮件的屏障——是垃圾邮件“避孕套”。HubSpot甚至创建了一则宣传广告，在T恤衫上印有“要做爱，不要垃圾邮件。”

来到这家公司，让我感觉置身于一座偏远的海岛，一群人已经在这里与世隔绝生活了许多年，他们制定自己的规则、仪式、宗教和语言，在某种程度上，甚至创造了属于他们自己的现实。事实上，这种情况在所有公司都存在，但基于某些原因，科技初创公司更倾向于集体思维。几乎每一家科技初创公司都是如此。要想在这类公司工作，先决条件是相信你的公司不只想着赚钱，你所做的工作有特殊的意义和目的，你的公司有神圣的使命，而你希望成为这个使命的一份子。

在HubSpot，员工需要遵守公司文化准则。这些准则整理了一些不同寻常的语言，并列出一系列共同的价值观和信念。文化准则类似于某种宣言，是一个128页的幻灯片文件，名为“HubSpot文化准则：创建我们热爱的公司。”

这套准则的创建者是HubSpot的联合创始人之一。在公司内部，人们通常直呼他的姓哈米斯，有人甚至将他视为精神领袖。哈米斯称自己花了100个小时制作这个幻灯片。面试我的，正是他和另一位联合创始人布莱恩•哈利干。几天后，他给我发来了幻灯片的链接，我想这是他吸引我加入公司的诱饵。他说，这个幻灯片“描述了HubSpot的文化。”

文化准则描绘了一种公司乌托邦，认为个人需求要让位于集体的需求——其中一条幻灯片提到“团队大于个人”——并且员工不需要担心工作-生活平衡问题，因为工作便是他们的生活。

文化准则问道：“成为一位HubSpot人意味着什么？”然后定义了这一术语的含义，并解释了哈米斯所称的HEART理念，即谦逊、高效、适应能力、卓越和透明。HubSpot的员工要想成功，必须具备这些品质。真正具备这些品质的HubSpot员工可以“创造奇迹”。

哈米斯也承认，文化准则中的许多内容都是“期待实现的目标”，这意味着HubSpot在实际工作当中并没有将其中一些价值观付诸实施，而是期待未来落实。HubSpot的价值观之一是透明，并非简单的透明，而是“从根本上做到不同寻常的透明。”

文化准则成为公司开展公关活动的妙招，吸引其他许多初创公司竞相模仿。哈米斯在线发布幻灯片之后，其浏览次数已经超过100万次。这令他倍受鼓舞，他正准备写一本与公司文化有关的著作。

哈米斯的文化准则包含了HubSpeak的许多要素。例如，文化准则指出，如果有人辞职或被解雇，公司会用“毕业”来指代这种事情。加入HubSpot的第一个月，我在市场营销部门便见证了许多次毕业。所有员工都收到了“头盖骨”的电子邮件，内容是：“特此通知各位团队成员，德里克已经从HubSpot毕业，我们很期待看到他如何在下一次大冒险中发挥自己的超能力！”这时你才会发现，德里克已经离职，他的办公桌早已被收拾干净。德里克的上司将在无人知晓的情况下，安排他从公司消失。人们就这样离奇消失，就像Spinal Tap乐队的鼓手们一样。

没有人会谈论“毕业”的人，甚至没有人会讨论把离职描述为“毕业”是多么古怪的作法。事实上，我从未听到有人嘲笑HEART理念，或者拿公司的文化准则开玩笑。所有人好像都觉得这些事情再正常不过。

HubSpot的员工会谈论成为“拥有超能力的超级明星”，他们的使命是“激励他人”和“成为领导者”。他们谈论专心“取悦客户”（delightion），这个杜撰的词出自哈米斯之手，意思是让客户高兴。

理想的HubSpot员工，应该具备一种品质——GSD，代表“即便是令人恶心的事情，也要做好”。它被用作形容词，例如“考特尼总是保持超级GSD的状态。”客户培训研讨会的负责人被称为集客式营销教授，属于HubSpot学院的教职员工。我们的软件具有神奇的力量，只要人们使用它——等一下——就会产生一加一等于三的效果。哈利干和哈米斯在HubSpot年度客户大会上首次提出这一神奇的理念。在他们身后，一个巨大的幻灯片上写着“1 + 1 = 3”。从那之后，这个理念便成为公司的口号。人们将一加一等于三的理念，作为评估新想法的衡量标准。有一天，公关部负责人斯平纳对我说：“我喜欢这个创意，不过我不确定它是否产生一加一等于三的效果。”

事实证明，我太天真了。我用25年时间报道科技公司，我以为自己非常了解这个行业。但在HubSpot，我发现许多我信以为真的事情都是错误的。

例如，我以为科技公司首先都有伟大的发明——一款令人惊艳的配件，一款出色的软件等。例如在苹果公司，史蒂夫•乔布斯和史蒂夫•沃兹尼亚克建造了一台个人电脑；在微软，比尔•盖茨和保罗•艾伦开发出编程语言和一款操作系统；谢尔盖•布林和拉里•佩奇创造出谷歌搜索引擎。科技公司要将工程设计放在首位，其次才是销售。这是我对科技公司的理解。

但HubSpot却截然相反。HubSpot最初聘用的职位包括一位销售总监和一位市场营销总监。哈利干和哈米斯分别担任这两个职位，尽管他们没有任何可以销售的产品，也不知道他们要做什么产品。HubSpot最初就是一家寻找产品的销售公司。

另外，新工作让我学到的另外一件事是，虽然人们依旧把这个行业称为“科技行业”，但事实上，如今技术已经不是关键所在。我有一位朋友从上世纪80年代开始在科技行业工作，曾是一位投资银行家，目前为初创公司提供咨询服务，他表示：“如今，发明伟大的技术已经无法得到回报。关键是商业模式。如果你的公司能够迅速扩大规模，市场便会给你回报。关键在于迅速把公司做大。不需要盈利，只要扩大规模就可以。”

这正是HubSpot的作法。所以，风险投资家才会在HubSpot投入大量资金，他们才会相信HubSpot的IPO一定能取得成功。也是基于这个原因，HubSpot才会招聘如此多年轻人。这是投资者希望看到的：一大批年轻人，开开心心地工作，谈论着改变世界。这种做法很受欢迎。

此外，招聘年轻人的另一个原因是成本低。HubSpot目前仍在亏损，但公司的业务属于劳动密集型。如何以尽可能最低的工资，吸引数百人从事销售和营销工作？一种方式就是招聘大学毕业生，并让工作看起来很有趣。为他们提供免费的啤酒和桌式足球。把工作场所装饰成幼儿园和兄弟会聚会场所的样子。举行派对。只要做到这些，你便能找到无数年轻人，领着3.5万美元的年薪，愿意在狭窄的房间里埋头苦干。

除了各种有趣的硬件之外，你还要创造一种假象，尽量让工作看起来富有意义。假如千禧一代不关心收入问题，但使命感可以给他们带来巨大的鼓舞。你就要给他们创造一个使命。你告诉员工他们有多么特殊，加入这家公司是多么幸运。你告诉他们，在这里获得一份工作要比考入哈佛大学难得多；公司之所以选择他们去实现一个非常重要的使命，去改变世界，是因为他们具备超能力。你要制作一个团队标识。给每个人发一顶帽子和一件T恤衫。你要编写一套文化准则，谈论如何创建一家所有人都热爱的公司。你要用一些人可能一夜暴富的前景来吸引员工。

2014年末的一个星期四，我来到老板的办公桌前，告诉他我得到了一个新的工作机会。新工作要在1月份入职，但我还是提前6周通知了他。他要求我重新考虑一下。但我告诉他，很感谢他的建议，但我已经下定决心。

我知道，很快就会有消息传出，说我即将“毕业”。走出大学校园30年后，知道自己将再经历一次“离校”仪式，是一种很奇怪但又令我感到满足的感觉。我要像过去几个月目睹的其他HubSpot毕业生一样，“在下一次大冒险中发挥我的超能力！”

但当天晚上，“头盖骨”给所有HubSpot信徒的电子邮件中，对此事只字未提。这意味着，我被解雇了——那个周五将是我在公司的最后一天。

本文作者丹•莱昂斯，是HBO电视剧《硅谷》的编剧，也是一位小说家和电影编剧。他曾在《新闻周刊》担任编辑。

《财富》杂志编者手记——

HubSpot于2014年8月25日申请IPO，同年10月在纽约证券交易所上市，交易代码为HUBS，估值8.8亿美元。本文作者丹•莱昂斯于2014年12月离职。他从未在公司的非贬低和保密文件上签字。（HubSpot表示不会就员工协议发表意见。）2015年7月29日，HubSpot发布新闻稿称，公司CMO迈克•沃尔普，也就是本文提到的“头盖骨”已被公司解雇，原因是他“试图获得”一本涉及HubSpot的书，“违反了公司商业操行与道德条例”。据推测，此书引用了本文内容。HubSpot后来向《财富》杂志确认此事。

《财富》杂志曾试图通过电子邮件和电话征询沃尔普先生对此事的意见，但联系未果。针对莱昂斯在该公司的经历，HubSpot公司CEO兼联合创始人布莱恩•哈利干表示：“我们认为，当今要建立一家伟大的公司，关键是明白世界的变化方式，对于这些改变我们要做些什么，以及为什么我们的工作如此重要。10年前创建HubSpot时，我们就相信人们买卖商品的方式已经发生了根本性地改变。我们认为帮助公司适应这一改变存在巨大的机遇，今天，令我们引以为豪的是，有超过1.8万名客户选择与我们合作，寻求转变他们的营销和销售方式。”(财富中文网)

译者：刘进龙/汪皓

审校：任文科

If you made a movie about a laid-off, sad-sack, fiftysomething guy who is given one big chance to start his career over, the opening scene might begin like this: a Monday morning in April, sunny and cool, with a brisk wind blowing off the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass.  The man—gray hair, unstylishly cut; horn-rimmed glasses; button-down shirt—pulls his Subaru Outback into a parking garage and, palms a little sweaty, grabs his sensible laptop backpack and heads to the front door of a gleaming, renovated historic redbrick building. It is April 15, 2013, and that man is me. I’m heading for my first day of work at HubSpot, the first job I’ve ever had that wasn’t in a newsroom.

HubSpot’s offices occupy several floors of a 19th-century furniture factory that has been transformed into the cliché of what the home of a tech startup should look like: exposed beams, frosted glass, a big atrium, modern art hanging in the lobby. Riding the elevator to the third floor, I feel both nerves and adrenaline. Part of me still can’t believe that I’ve pulled this off. Nine months ago I was unceremoniously dumped from my job atNewsweek magazine in New York. I was terrified that I might never work again. Now I’m about to become a marketing guy at one of the hottest tech startups on the East Coast—a software company that has created an “inbound marketing” platform, which helps companies pull customers in (through blogs, social publishing, and other content), in contrast to outbound marketing (traditional advertising). There is one slight problem: I know nothing about marketing. This didn’t seem like such a big deal when I was going through the interviews and talking these people into hiring me. Now I’m not so sure.

I reassure myself by remembering that HubSpot seems pretty excited about having me come aboard. Cranium (my endearing name for the fellow), the chief marketing officer, or CMO, wrote an article on the HubSpot blog announcing that he had hired me. Tech blogs wrote up the story of the 52-year-old Newsweek journalist leaving the media business to go work for a software company.

A guy named Zack meets me and tells me he’s sorry Cranium isn’t here today, but he wants to give me a tour around the offices. Zack is in his twenties. He has a friendly smile and gelled hair. He reminds me of the interns at Newsweek, recent college graduates who did background research for the writers. I figure he must be someone’s assistant.

The offices bear a striking resemblance to the Montessori preschool that my kids attended: lots of bright basic colors, plenty of toys, and a nap room with a hammock and soothing palm tree murals on the wall. The office-as-playground trend was made famous by Google and has spread like an infection across the tech industry. Work can’t just be work; work has to be fun. HubSpot is divided into “neighborhoods,” each named after a section of Boston: North End, South End, Charlestown. One neighborhood has a set of musical instruments, in case people want to have an impromptu jam session, which Zack says never happens. Every neighborhood has little kitchens, with automatic espresso machines, and lounge areas with couches and chalkboard walls where people have written things like “HubSpot = cool” alongside inspirational messages like “There is a reason we have two ears and one mouth. So that we listen twice as much as we speak.”

On the ground floor an enormous conference room doubles as a game room, with the requisite foosball table, Ping-Pong table, indoor shuffleboard, and videogames. The cafeteria next door boasts industrial refrigerators stocked with cases of beer, cabinets with bagels and cereal, and, on one wall, a set of glass dispensers that hold an assortment of nuts and candy. It’s called the “candy wall,” and Zack explains that HubSpotters are especially proud of it. The wall is one of the first things they show off to visitors. It’s a young place, with lots of energy. Teams go on outings to play trampoline dodgeball and race go-karts and play laser tag.

Dogs roam HubSpot’s hallways, because like the kindergarten decor, dogs have become de rigueur for tech startups. At noon, Zack tells me, a group of bros meets in the lobby on the second floor to do push-ups together. Upstairs there is a place where you can drop off your dry cleaning. Sometimes they bring in massage therapists. On the second floor there are shower rooms, which are intended for bike commuters and people who jog at lunchtime, but also have been used as sex cabins when the Friday happy hour gets out of hand. Later I will learn (from Penny, the receptionist, who is a fantastic source of gossip) that at one point things got so out of hand that management had to send out a memo. “It’s the people from sales,” Penny tells me. “They’re disgusting.”

Later I also will hear a story about janitors coming in one Saturday morning to find the following things in the first-floor men’s room: a bunch of half-empty beers, a huge pool of vomit, and a pair of thong panties. The janitors were not happy. They get even more distressed when, one morning, a twenty-something guy from the HubSpot marketing department arrives wasted and, for reasons unknown, sets a janitor’s cart on fire.

Everyone works in vast, open spaces, crammed next to one another like seamstresses in Bangladeshi shirt factories, only instead of being hunched over sewing machines people are hunched over laptops. Nerf-gun battles rage, with people firing weapons from behind giant flat-panel monitors, ducking and rolling under desks. People hold standing meetings and even walking meetings, meaning the whole group goes for a walk and the meeting takes place while you’re walking.

Nobody has an office, not even the CEO. There is a rule about this. Every three months, everyone switches seats, in a corporate version of musical chairs. HubSpot calls this a “seating hack” and says the point is to remind everyone that change is constant. If you want privacy, you need to book one of the meeting rooms that are strung around the edges of the working spaces. Some meeting rooms are named after Red Sox players, others after “famous marketers”—I take a moment to let that sink in. Some have beanbag chairs instead of actual furniture, and in those rooms people sprawl out, with laptops propped on their knees.

Every new HubSpot employee has to go through training to learn how to use the software. That’s a good idea, and it also keeps me from having to worry about what I’m supposed to be doing here, or why Cranium, who hired me, still has never come by to say hello or talk about what he wants me to work on.

Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with 20 other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult. It’s everything I ever imagined might take place inside a tech company, only even better.

Our head trainer is Dave, a wiry, energetic guy in his forties with a shaved head and a gray goatee. On the first day we all go around and introduce ourselves, and tell everyone about something that makes us special. Dave’s thing is that he plays in a heavy-metal cover band on weekends.

Dave is part teacher and part preacher. Every two weeks he gets a batch of new recruits, and he goes through the same spiel, showing the same slides, telling the same jokes. He’s good at it. He loves HubSpot, he tells us, unabashedly. He’s had lots of jobs, and this is by far the best place he’s ever worked. This company has changed his life. He hopes it will change ours as well.

“We’re not just selling a product here,” Dave tells us. “HubSpot is leading a revolution. A movement. HubSpot is changing the world. This software doesn’t just help companies sell products. This product changes people’s lives. We are changing people’s lives.”

He tells a story about a guy named Brandon, a pool installer in Virginia. His business was struggling. He could barely get by. But then he started using HubSpot software, and his business took off. Soon his company was installing pools all around the country. He was rich! Eventually he was doing so well that he hired someone else to run his pool company so that he could become a motivational speaker. He travels the world spreading the gospel of inbound marketing, transforming the lives of thousands of other people.

“This guy has become a superstar,” Dave says. “He’s a rock star. And it all started with HubSpot. That’s what we’re doing here. That’s what you are part of.”

The truth is that we’re selling software that lets companies, most of them small businesses like pool installers and flower shops, sell more stuff. The world of online marketing, where HubSpot operates, though, has a reputation for being kind of grubby. Our customers include people who make a living bombarding people with email offers, or gaming Google’s search algorithm, or figuring out which kind of misleading subject line is most likely to trick someone into opening a message. Online marketing is not quite as sleazy as Internet porn, but it’s not much better either.

Nevertheless, Dave is laying it on thick, and the new recruits are nodding their heads and seem to be eating it up. Most of them are right out of college, clean-cut and well scrubbed. The guy next to me has a buzz cut and just graduated from some college in New Hampshire. He tells me that he lives with his parents and commutes an hour to get here, but he’s thinking about moving closer to Boston and getting his own place.

HubSpot doesn’t just sell this software—it also teaches people how to use it and in general how to be more effective at selling stuff online. At its annual customer conference, Inbound, thousands of online marketers flock to Boston to learn new tricks. One involves using a misleading subject line in an email—something like, “fwd: your holiday plans”—to dupe people into opening the message. “Boosting your open rate,” they call it. At the conference HubSpot also shows off new features and products, like one that puts a tracking cookie on the computer of everyone who visits your website and keeps track of every page the person visits. The software can even send you an alert when someone comes back to your website for a second visit—so you can call that person immediately and say, “Hey, I see you’re on our website! Is there something I can help you with?”

That’s the business we’re in: Buy our software, sell more stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not exactly how HubSpot bills itself or describes what it does. In training we’re taught that the billions of emails that we blast into the world do not constitute email spam. Instead, those emails are what we call “lovable marketing content.” That is really what our trainers call it. The convoluted logic behind this is that “spam” means unsolicited email, and we send email only to people who have handed over their contact information by filling out a form and giving us their permission to be contacted. Our emails might be unwanted, but they’re not, strictly speaking, unsolicited, and therefore they are not spam. And even though we and our customers send out literally billions of email messages, we’re not trying to annoy people—in fact we are trying to help them. Sending one message after another, each time with a different subject line, is how we discover what someone wants. We’re learning about them. We’re listening to them.

Thus, what we’re creating is not spam. In fact, the official line is that HubSpot hates spam and wants to stamp out spam. We want to protect people from spam. Spam is what the bad guys send, but we are the good guys. Our spam is not spam. In fact it is the opposite of spam. It’s antispam. It’s a shield against spam—a spam condom. HubSpot has even created a promotional campaign, with T-shirts that say make love not spam.

Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality. This happens at all organizations, but for some reason tech startups seem to be especially prone to groupthink. Every tech startup seems to be like this. Believing that your company is not just about making money, that there is a meaning and a purpose to what you do, that your company has a mission, and that you want to be part of that mission—that is a big prerequisite for working at one of these places.

At HubSpot, employees abide by precepts outlined in the company’s culture code, a document that codifies HubSpot’s unusual language and sets forth a set of shared values and beliefs. The culture code is a manifesto of sorts, a 128-slide PowerPoint deck titled “The HubSpot Culture Code: Creating a Company We Love.”

The code’s creator is HubSpot’s co-founder. Inside the company he is always referred to simply by his first name, Dharmesh, and some people seem to view him as a kind of spiritual leader. Dharmesh claims it took him 100 hours to make the slides. He sent me a link to the slide deck a few days after I interviewed with him and his co-founder, Brian Halligan, I suppose as an inducement to join the company. He said it was a slide deck that “describes HubSpot’s culture.”

The code depicts a kind of corporate utopia where the needs of the individual become secondary to the needs of the group—“team > individual,” one slide says—and where people don’t worry about work-life balance because their work is their life.

The culture code asks, “What does it mean to be HubSpotty?” and then defines the meaning of that term, explaining a concept that Dharmesh called HEART, an acronym that stands for humble, effective, adaptable, remarkable, and transparent. These are the traits that HubSpotters must possess in order to be successful. The ultimate HubSpotter is someone who can “make magic” while embodying all five traits of HEART.

Much of the code is “aspirational,” as Dharmesh concedes, meaning that some of these values are ones that HubSpot doesn’t actually put into practice yet but hopes to someday. One of HubSpot’s values involves being transparent, and not just transparent but “radically and remarkably transparent.”

The culture code has been an enormous PR coup for the company and a model that a lot of other startups have emulated. When Dharmesh posted his slides online they received more than 1 million views. This inspired him so much that now he is setting out to write a book about corporate culture.

Dharmesh’s culture code incorporates elements of HubSpeak. For example, it instructs that when someone quits or gets fired, the event will be referred to as “graduation.” In my first month at HubSpot I’ve witnessed several graduations, just in the marketing department. We’ll get an email from Cranium saying, “Team, just letting you know that Derek has graduated from HubSpot, and we’re excited to see how he uses his superpowers in his next big adventure!” Only then do you notice that Derek is gone, that his desk has been cleared out. Somehow Derek’s boss will have arranged his disappearance without anyone knowing about it. People just go up in smoke, like Spinal Tap drummers.

Nobody ever talks about the people who graduate, and nobody ever mentions how weird it is to call it “graduation.” For that matter I never hear anyone laugh about HEART or make jokes about the culture code. Everyone acts as if all of these things are perfectly normal.

HubSpotters talk about being “superstars with superpowers” whose mission is to “inspire people” and “be leaders.” They talk about engaging in “delightion,” which is a made-up word, invented by Dharmesh, that means delighting our customers.

The ideal HubSpotter is someone who exhibits a quality known as GSD, which stands for “get shit done.” This is used as an adjective, as in “Courtney is always in super-GSD mode.” The people who lead customer training seminars are called inbound marketing professors and belong to the faculty at HubSpot Academy. Our software is magical, such that when people use it—wait for it—one plus one equals three. Halligan and Dharmesh first introduced this alchemical concept at HubSpot’s annual customer conference, with a huge slide behind them that said “1 + 1 = 3.” Since then it has become an actual slogan at the company. People use the concept of one plus one equals three as a prism through which to evaluate new ideas. One day Spinner, the woman who runs PR, tells me, “I like that idea, but I’m not sure that it’s one-plus-one-equals-three enough.”

It turns out I’ve been naive. I’ve spent 25 years writing about technology companies, and I thought I understood this industry. But at HubSpot I’m discovering that a lot of what I believed was wrong.

I thought, for example, that tech companies began with great inventions—an amazing gadget, a brilliant piece of software. At Apple, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built a personal computer; at Microsoft, Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed programming languages and then an operating system; Sergey Brin and Larry Page created the Google search engine. Engineering came first, and sales came later. That’s how I thought things worked.

But HubSpot did the opposite. HubSpot’s first hires included a head of sales and a head of marketing. Halligan and Dharmesh filled these positions even though they had no product to sell and didn’t even know what product they were going to make. HubSpot started out as a sales operation in search of a product.

Another thing I’m learning in my new job is that while people still refer to this business as the “tech industry,” in truth it is no longer really about technology at all. “You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises startups. “It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.”

That’s what HubSpot is doing. That’s why venture capitalists have sunk so much money into HubSpot, and why they believe HubSpot will have a successful IPO. That’s also why HubSpot hires so many young people. That’s what investors want to see: a bunch of young people, having a blast, talking about changing the world. It sells.

Another reason to hire young people is that they’re cheap. HubSpot runs at a loss, but it is labor-intensive. How can you get hundreds of people to work in sales and marketing for the lowest possible wages? One way is to hire people who are right out of college and make work seem fun. You give them free beer and foosball tables. You decorate the place like a cross between a kindergarten and a frat house. You throw parties. Do that, and you can find an endless supply of bros who will toil away in the spider monkey room for $35,000 a year.

On top of the fun stuff you create a mythology that attempts to make the work seem meaningful. Supposedly millennials don’t care so much about money, but they’re very motivated by a sense of mission. So, you give them a mission. You tell your employees how special they are and how lucky they are to be here. You tell them that it’s harder to get a job here than to get into Harvard and that because of their superpowers they have been selected to work on a very important mission to change the world. You make a team logo. You give everyone a hat and a T-shirt. You make up a culture code and talk about creating a company that everyone can love. You dangle the prospect that some might get rich.

One Thursday in late 2014, I stop by my boss’s desk and tell him I’ve been offered a new job. I won’t start until January, but I am giving him six weeks’ notice. He asks me to reconsider. I tell him I appreciate the offer, but I’ve made up my mind.

Soon, I know, word will get out that I am “graduating.” It’s a strange but somehow satisfying feeling to know that, roughly three decades after my college career has ended, I am set to go through that ritualized departure once more. I am going to be like so many other HubSpot graduates I’ve seen come and go over the past several months—“using my superpowers in the next big adventure!”

But the email that Cranium sends to the HubSpot faithful that evening doesn’t mention anything about any of that. It just implies that I’ve been fired—and that Friday will be my last day.

Dan Lyons, a writer for the HBO series Silicon Valley, is a novelist and screenwriter. He is a former editor at “Newsweek.”

HubSpot filed for an IPO on Aug. 25, 2014, and launched under the symbol HUBS on the New York Stock Exchange that October, with a market valuation of $880 million. Dan Lyons left HubSpot in December 2014. He never signed the nondisparagement and nondisclosure paperwork the company gave him. (HubSpot says it won’t comment on employee agreements.) On July 29, 2015, HubSpot issued a press release saying its CMO, Mike Volpe—the man called “Cranium” in Lyons’s book—had been terminated because he “violated the Company’s Code of Business Conduct and Ethics” in his “attempts to procure” a copy of a book involving HubSpot, presumably the book excerpted above, a fact that HubSpot confirmed with Fortune . We attempted by email and telephone to contact Mr. Volpe for comment; we were unable to reach him. When asked for comment on Lyons’s experience at the company, HubSpot CEO and co-founder Brian Halligan said the following: “We believe that to build a great company today, it’s essential to have a point of view on how the world has changed, what you are doing about it and why it matters. We started HubSpot a decade ago believing that the way people buy and sell had fundamentally changed. We saw an opportunity to help organizations adjust to that shift, and today we’re proud to have more than 18,000 customers who have chosen to partner with us to transform how they market and sell.”