Despite its unicorns, the start-up world is earning a reputation for burning-out and burning through employees.

In his new book Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us, acclaimed journalist Dan Lyons searches for answers. Someone somewhere must be doing it right.

As he documented in his New York Times bestselling book Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, the frontier world of tech is rife with fad-chasing venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and "wantrapreneurs," bloggers and brogrammers, social climbers and sociopaths. Every year, companies churn through a new stock of big-eyed idealists, hungry for a quick buck. As the demands on employees grow increasingly more intense, the rewards grow opaquer.

Traveling to workplaces across America, Lyons finds four key factors for how the social contract between employee and employer was broken. Ultimately, the powerhouse former Forbes editor offers a vision for what the workplace could be: “an approach to work and business that puts people first, profitably [that] serves customers, and makes the world a little bit better in the process.”

Escape the grind and discover a new vision for what work can be!