[1] Lyons began his career with a book of short stories, The Last Good Man (1993), a novel, Dog Days (1998), and a fictional biography, Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs (2007).

Lyons then began writing non-fiction books: Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2016), Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us (2018) and STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World (2023).

He was a writer and coproducer[3] on HBO's Silicon Valley and wrote the script for the May 2015 episode "White Hat/Black Hat"[4] while on a 14-week break from HubSpot in 2014.

[5] Dan Lyons authored the book Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start Up Bubble (2016) about his time at the Boston, Massachusetts, startup HubSpot.

He was also the author of the Forbes cover article, "Attack of the Blogs", where he wrote that blogs "are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective," claiming that Groklaw was primarily created "to bash software maker SCO Group in its Linux patent lawsuit against IBM, producing laughably biased, pro-IBM coverage.

"[13][14][15] In 2007 Lyons admitted to being "Snowed By SCO": "For four years, I've been covering a lawsuit for Forbes.com, and my early predictions on this case have turned out to be so profoundly wrong that I am writing this mea culpa ...

Previous guesses as to the blog's author included Leander Kahney of Wired (particularly at some of Fake Steve Jobs's Briticisms),[24] Eric Savitz of Barron's Magazine,[25] John Paczkowski of All Things Digital,[26] and Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun-Times.

[27] Another suggestion was that Jack Miller, the webmaster/blogger of the "As the Apple Turns" website, which was seemingly abandoned in 2006, but which is still live, could possibly be Fake Steve Jobs.