Daniel Lyons's Blog

The Bell Nexus May Be the Coolest Thing I’ve Ever Seen

Imagine landing at O’Hare and then instead of sitting in a taxi and spending more than an hour crawling along in traffic to get into the city, you climb into a drone and zoom downtown and land on top of a skyscraper in just a few minutes. Better yet, imagine the drone doesn’t have a human pilot, and just flies itself. This sounds like science fiction, but companies are already working on this – it’s called Urban Air Mobility (UAM) – and they’re farther along than you might think. In fact a couple days ago, I sat in one of these things.

It’s called the Bell Nexus, and it’s built by Bell Helicopter Textron. The engineering is done in Texas. It was like getting a little taste of the future. This happened at a conference in Chicago hosted by the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI). I was there to give a keynote address. As soon as I got off stage I raced over to the expo hall to meet the people from Bell and see the Nexus.

It’s an amazing machine. It looks like a Parrot drone that’s been blown up to enormous proportions and kitted out with a really deluxe interior. It’s all electric. There are six rotors, each with a set of redundant electric motors. They’re all powered by a giant battery pack in the tail.

The Nexus holds four passengers and a pilot. Eventually the idea is to build a Nexus that can operate as an autonomous vehicle. But at first the aircraft will be piloted by a human. Someday there might be dozens of them shuttling people around inside big cities. There are loads of hurtles to get over before we get to that point, obviously. But a lot of people believe we’ll have things like the Nexus operating in the airspace around big cities within 10 years.

Another thing I learned: people in the UAM are really, really tired of hearing about the Jetsons. Supposedly there’s a guy at the FAA who keeps a bowl on his desk, and anyone who says the word “Jetsons” has to put a dollar in the bowl.

Here’s the cockpit:

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Praise for Lab Rats

Inc magazine puts Lab Rats on its Top Business Books of 2018 list.

Lab Rats wins a coveted Malcolm Tucker Award as the Sweariest Business Book of 2018.

 

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Kirkus raves about Lab Rats

Just like Publishers Weekly, the reviewer at Kirkus thought Lab Rats was a fine piece of work, calling it “a passionate indictment of brutal workplace culture.”

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Publishers Weekly loves Lab Rats and gives it a starred review

Amazing pre-publication starred review of Lab Rats in Publishers Weekly.

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“Nothing to lose but their laptops”

The Economist was the first really “serious” publication that I ever subscribed to, way back in the 1980s. It has always seemed to me to be the best and smartest publication in the world, not just about business but about everything. So I was mightily pleased to get a glowing review for Lab Rats in The Economist, titled, “An entertaining polemic against the tech industry.” I think Lab Rats is a lot more than just that, but anyway. I’ll take it!

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Startups: Still White, Still Young, Still Incredibly Pleased With Themselves

Business Insider just published a list of the “50 Best Small Companies to Work For of 2017, According to Employees.” A bunch of the companies sent photos of their shiny, happy employees. As I scrolled through the photos, I started to notice something. It’s kind of a … pattern. See if you can spot it.

The #1 top company is Periscope Data, in San Francisco. These folks are having a blast! Woo-hoo!

 

Here’s #12, Branch Metrics, and they’re having a blast too!

 

Here’s #13, Civic Actions and OMG you guys:

 

Next up is #15, Cybereason, and they’re all … business.

 

Here is #16, BambooHR. They do HR!

 

In the #26 spot is RealSelf:

 

At #27 is Lullabot — they seem kind of low-energy.

 

The #35 company is OmegaFi. The name sounds like a frat. Guess what? They make software for running frats.

 

The #38 company is Cotopaxi, named after a mountain in South America.

 

Have you spotted the pattern? They’re all so … happy. Yeah, that’s it. They’re all so happy.

This is even more depressing than the statistics that Apple, Google and Facebook publish every year, showing that they have “made little progress.” New companies are starting fresh. They can avoid the monoculture mistake that previous companies have made. But based on these photos, some don’t seem to be trying.

The companies that end up on lists like this are often the pep-squad types who work really hard to get on lists like this. It’s free marketing. It helps them recruit. But mostly, they totally think that they’re totally awesome. They’re the best.

Presumably the photos you see above were provided by the companies themselves. Which means someone gathered up the whole gang, took a bunch of photos, chose the best one, and sent it along.

And no one ever noticed the blinding, overwhelming whiteness. Which kind of says it all.

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In Tech, 9-to-5 Is for Losers!

A few months ago I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about workaholism in Silicon Valley. It’s true that workaholism isn’t new. What is new is the way it is celebrated as an appealing lifestyle. You can read the article here. And here’s a money quote:

A century ago, factory workers were forming unions and going on strike to demand better conditions and a limit on hours. Today, Silicon Valley employees celebrate their own exploitation. “9 to 5 is for the weak” says a popular T-shirt. A venture capitalist named Keith Rabois recently boasted on Twitter that he worked for 18 years while taking less than one week of vacation. Wannabe Zuckerbergs are told that starting a company is like joining the Navy SEALs. For a certain type of person — usually young and male — the hardship is part of the allure.

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Why Older Workers Still Matter

This fall I gave a talk at a conference hosted by Degreed, a software company in the learning-and-development space. The talk had two parts. One, what it’s like to be a Gen-X or Boomer trying to hang on in the workplace and deal with so much change. Two, how a Gen-X or Boomer employee can learn, grow, reinvent, and remain relevant. And look, I’m wearing a suit!

 

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Talk: Why the Silicon Valley Business Model Creates Income Inequality

My talk at the Open Source Leadership Summit went well enough that they asked me to come back and speak at the Open Source Summit, in Los Angeles, over the summer. This talk is a lot like the one I gave in Tahoe but I think it’s a bit more polished. Enjoy!

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OSLF Talk: Stallman Was Right!

Last winter I gave a talk at the Open Source Leadership Forum, which took place at Squaw Valley. It was an incredible event. I got to see Linus Torvalds talk and then afterward, my son and I met him. Linus has been a hero of mine for a long time, and while I’ve spoken to him on the phone, I’d never met him in person.

Here is the video of my talk:

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