Hubspot's diversity data
A tension between company values and on-the-ground reality in Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (on p. 80-1 of my copy):
HubSpot seems to recruit a certain kind of person: young and easily influenced, kids who belonged to sororities and fraternities or played sports in college. Many are working in their first jobs. As far as I can tell there are no black people, not just among my recruiting class, but across the entire company. The HubSpotters are not just white but a certain kind of white: middle-class, suburban, mostly from the Boston area. They look the same, dress the same. The uniformity is amazing.
HubSpot prides itself on having numbers for everything – it’s a data-driven organization – and for being radically transparent. Yet oddly enough, HR, or “people operations,” as it is called, claims to have no statistics on diversity. One day, after sitting through a company meeting and noticing the bleachy-clean, driven-snow, Mormon-level whiteness of the crowd, I send an email to a woman in HR asking if we have any statistics about diversity. She sends back a terse response: No. Why?