PREMIER EVENT: DAN LYONS in conversation with JOSHUA DAVIS


Credit: Kim Cook

 

 

 

 

Credit: Sebastian Mlynarski
 

PREMIER EVENT: Dan Lyons in conversation with Joshua Davis

With a special introduction by Silicon Valley legend, Guy Kawasaki

Wednesday, April 13, 2016, 7:30 p.m.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

Tickets are available at Kepler's and online at Brown Paper Tickets

 

On Wednesday, April 13, we're bringing one of the funniest writers around to Kepler's when Dan Lyons joins us to talk with Joshua Davis about his new book, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble. Buy your tickets HERE.

At the age of 52, Dan got dumped from his career-long job as a journalist and editor at Newsweek. He was kind of screwed. So he joined a multi-million-dollar startup as a marketing guru, hoping to reinvent himself for the modern age.

It did not go well. 

 

Along the way, Dan Lyons:

  • Rationalizes that while the work might be ignoble, it’s not necessarily evil. “We’re just annoying people,” he writes. “Sure, arguably we are making the world a little bit worse—but only a little bit. That’s what I tell myself.”
  • Is banished to the company’s telemarketing center, a workplace that can best be described as a combination of Glengarry Glen Ross and Dante’s Inferno. 
  • Finds himself in a strategy meeting with grown men and women, talking to a teddy bear.
  • Encounters a headline-generating program that spits out sure-fire marketing copy like “Why We Love Cervical Cancer (And You Should Too!)”
  • Is chastised for refusing to participate in “Fearless Friday,” a weekly event in which employees are encouraged to do anything they want—except for their actual job.
  • Has a “Norma Rae” moment in which he tries to convince his co-workers that being paid in candy and free soda isn’t actually fair compensation. They aren’t buying it.
  • Watches the CEO of his company tell the New York Times that “Gray hair and experience are really overrated.”
  • At his lowest moment, Dan launches into a proposal to hide $5,000 in Golden Gate Park that then morphs into a plan to shoot the money out of a cannon and finally into a plan to shoot one of the marketing staff out of a cannon and directly into a cubicle to start giving a lecture about marketing.
  • Finally, Dan was later interviewed by the FBI over an investigation into his employers over wiretapping, hacking and an attempt to steal a draft of Disrupted, an event which ultimately led to the firing of the company’s chief marketing officer.

This is a seriously weird and funny story. If you've ever wondered what it's like for a grown-up to work at one of Silicon Valley's mythical "unicorns," you won't want to miss this very funny evening. And hey, it even has a happy ending - Dan writes for HBO's hit program Silicon Valley now. 

Dan Lyons is a novelist, journalist and screenwriter. He is currently a writer for the HBO series Silicon Valley. A former editor at Newsweek, he lives in Winchester, Massachusets. 

Joshua Davis is an SF-based contributing editor for Wired magazine, a Stanford alum, and the cofounder of Epic magazine (www.epicmagazine.com). He is the author of The Underdog: How I Survived the World’s Most Outlandish Competitions and Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream. In 2014, his work for Wired was nominated for a National Magazine Award for feature writing.

Read the New York Times review HERE.

Event date: 
Wednesday, April 13, 2016 - 7:30pm
Event address: 
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025-4349