Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

That’s when you can tell you’re really in some juicy shit; conversely, if you’re still emailing about it, there’s actually nothing real going on.

Startup entrepreneur, you are David before Goliath, the nascent state of Israel during the ’48 war, Crockett at the Alamo, the Spartans at Thermopylae.

Funny, that word, “fiduciary.” From the Latin fiduciarius, meaning “binding faith.” Legally, it refers to a condition of one party acting on behalf of another, with complete agency and assumed trust. In practice, whenever CEOs say it is their “fiduciary duty” to do something, it means they are granting themselves moral license to screw someone. Which, of course, is what I was about to do vis-à-vis Twitter.

The entrepreneur who bucks this and creates a long-term business of recurring revenue but relatively slow growth is dismissed as running a mere “lifestyle business,” which is a dirty word among VCs.

Of course, the entrepreneurs are quite happy to run a revenue-generating concern that spits out cash as low-tax dividends, and dedicate their lives to skiing or guitar playing or whatever. But their investors will hate them for it, and the entrepreneurs will suffer a loss of social capital as a result, and perhaps find they can’t raise money for their next venture.

We used to have unions that would give workers a magical thing called collective bargaining. Now being part of a hot startup is your union, and the only dues required are your entire life for the time you’re in the startup. Welcome to our new collectivism, tovarish. By bundling the talent, though, you command a premium due to mere leverage—don’t like the price, we’re all off the table.

Next up was Rohit Dhawan. Another Googler, he had that very well put together and confident air of someone who felt he had mastered his field of work (he was a Penn grad, of course). His angle was analytical ability, and he asked me a variant of that legendary Enrico Fermi brainteaser about piano tuners in Chicago. His variant was to estimate the number of planes in the sky at any given moment. It required nothing more than some rough base assumptions about number of airports and flights per day, and then some dimensional analysis that got us within an order of magnitude of reality, and we were done in ten minutes.

Amin changed to that slightly hushed and tense conspiratorial tone that people use, as if hiding in the bushes, when in fact I assumed he was in a closed-door conference room. He proceeded to do some pro bono dragoman-ing.

A mother destroyed with her own hands what she’d been programmed over aeons to love, just to keep on responding to Facebook notifications triggered by some idiot game.

A Tesla is effectively a car version of a fixie, with a bionic, doped-up Lance Armstrong pedaling.

SF is a city populated mostly by pussies, so finding a decent street race is difficult.

I had naively assumed that investors and founders would all participate in Twitter’s final acquisition price on a purely pro rata basis; basically, whatever fraction they owned in the cap table, they got. Little did I know that in the real world of deals, what’s very euphemistically called the “consideration” given to investors can vary widely per the whims and machinations of the founders and the acquiring company.

That the news story in question was written by the Wall Street Journal was incidental: your friend Fred had posted it, your other friend Andy had commented on it, and your wife had shared it with her friends.

Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future, we wouldn’t all be famous for fifteen minutes; we’d be famous 24/7 to fifteen people.

As I’d later learn, weirdly pointless versions of them would be held in the regional offices where no engineers even worked, as a sort of pagan celebration of the values of do-it-yourself creation, total commitment to the company, and disruptive innovation.

In a posthistorical developed world devoid of transcendent values, whose pantheons look like North Korean grocery stores, bare shelves empty of any gods or heroes, this corporate fascism was intoxicating.

The human need for immortality projects—those ends that dole out meaning and purpose beyond ourselves—hasn’t changed since the pyramids. The only difference now is the nature of the putative Holy Land, and the means for achieving it.

My official title was “product manager,” commonly abbreviated as “PM.” While the role of product manager is near universal in tech companies of any size, the de facto or de jure reality of it varies widely. What the PM does is in many ways representative of how the company itself develops product. Some companies have opted for different titles. At Microsoft, they are known as “program managers.” At Palantir, the secretive defense intelligence software company founded by the billionaire investor Peter Thiel, they are known as “product navigators,” which sounds terribly romantic.

By definition, what you do is everything that needs to be done, other than hands-on-keyboard type code. So that means sitting in endless meetings with the privacy legal team, giving highly selective and edited versions of what your product is going to do, and explaining how it fits into some antediluvian legal rubric.

As PM, if you can convince engineers to build things you stipulate, you are golden. But if you can’t, then you are like the dictator who has lost control of his army. It doesn’t matter if you have the United Nations or the church on your side (i.e., if management has anointed you as leader), you’re ending up in front of a firing squad sooner rather than later.

To use a physics analogy, pressure is force per unit area, and similarly, monetization is amount of data per pixel: the more data you bring to bear for every square inch of screen real estate, then the more that ad will be worth. Targeting is how that data gets applied to the screen real estate, it’s the alchemy that turns pure data into real-world cash.

No. I submit he was an old-school genius, the fiery force of nature possessed by a tutelary spirit of seemingly supernatural provenance that fuels and guides him, intoxicates his circle, and compels his retinue to be great as well.

For when I do leap into the abyss, I go headlong with my heels up, and am pleased to be falling in that degrading attitude, and consider it something beautiful.

figuring out what to build, how to build it, and how to sell it once built.

Sometimes you don’t finish a product, you merely abandon any hope of presently improving it, and out the door it goes.

Now imagine you have a written transcript of every conversation taking place, as well as an anonymous ID for every individual. You know where they are and whom they’re talking with. As the product manager for Facebook’s ad targeting, that’s effectively what you’ve got. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t. Ask yourself how often you mention anything of commercial import when you’re with friends around a sticky table in your favorite dive bar. If you had the chief marketing officers of every big brand and every merchant in the world listening over your shoulder, how often would their collective ears perk up? Actually, I know exactly how often; it’s one of the earliest studies we did when I got to Facebook. The short version is “not terribly often at all.” Nobody says things like “I really love how these Adidas Adizero Boston Boost 5 shoes felt today, and I think you should buy some as well.” (Adidas! Get in here and establish some brand value with the friend while her mind is vulnerable!) Or some beautifully parseable phrase like “I need to fly on July thirteenth to Boston, returning on July twenty-third, and wish to spend no more than three hundred and fifty dollars.” (TripAdvisor! Get in here with a fare quote!)

To earn your beer money as product manager you had to move that revenue needle a good 5 percent or so. That was about $100 million in revenue per year you had to generate, the equivalent of two or three Wall Street traders at a bank like Goldman.

What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood How that face shall watch his when cold it lies? Or thought, as his own mother kiss’d his eyes, Of what her kiss was when his father woo’d? —Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life

I chose Pelayo for the middle name, after the eighth-century Visigoth nobleman who initiated the seven-century-long struggle to free Spain from Islamic rule.

To me, only the man who needed nothing was truly free. Until I was financially independent (e.g., fuck-you money), or the captain of a profitable enterprise, I was merely a slave whose bondage was worth one or another price, locked in as much by diapers and tuition costs as by a vesting schedule.

Did I really want to be the Willy Loman figure, coming home after a shitty day at work, having a beer, but thinking it all worthwhile after staring into Zoë’s eyes, and then glumly taking the boss’s shit (again) the next day? Because that’s what it would be when we slapped the Bay Area mortgage, date night in Palo Alto, and two preschools onto the cash-flow statement.

The thought of commercial content inside the News Feed was still sacrilegious, and not mentioned in polite company. The mere thought of using outside data in Facebook ads delivery was similarly heretical, and not even considered.

I glided through the slides, lingering on the money shot: a plot of the number of ads reviewed versus human man-hours. The former was up and to the right (MOAR ADS!), the latter was flat (fewer expensive humans!).

The performance metrics of interest included clickthrough rates, which are a coarse measure of user interest. More convincing is the actual downstream monetization resulting from someone clicking through and buying something—assuming Facebook got the conversion data, which it often didn’t, given that Facebook didn’t have a conversion-tracking system.

The principal reason for you to be technical is not to help technically design the system under development; if you’re doing that, then you’re PMing wrong. No, you’re technical so you can tell when engineers are bullshitting you, which will be often. At times it’s accidental (as it was with Rong), due to either miscommunication, bad memory, or wishful thinking (engineers are as inclined to it as anybody). Sometimes it’s more stealthy, their passive-aggressive way to disagree with the product direction (“That’ll eat up all our servers”), or laziness (“It’s impossible to build that”). The PM is there to give a sniff test to any such product-killing assertion.

A little paranoid itch, almost like an extrasensory tingling doubt, made me wonder if we had really covered all the bases, despite the number of engineering conversations that had transpired.

Facebook doesn’t sell your data; it buys it. It does this by providing services to advertisers that incentivize them to let Facebook ingest the data you’ve generated outside Facebook. In fact, as we’ll soon see, Facebook is one of the most jealous guardians of user data known to man. It is a black hole of data that can never leave. All Facebook’s technology is designed thusly, and that will never change. If you stop for a moment and realize how suicidally stupid it would be for Facebook to hand over its data on users to anyone, for any amount of money, you’ll realize how tired that “Facebook sells your data” meme is.

This was Facebook culture for you: lots of bold, unconventional experiments, mostly failures with some notable successes, an immediate course correction to prune the failure, and then internalizing the experience via the culture. The crap murals and bluetape were as core to Facebook as the Like button (and Beacon).

by hybridizing their corporate DNA with the pluck and daring of the startup entrepreneur, they revitalize their internal cultures and add traits not typically found among their recruitment fodder (i.e., smart but obedient engineering grads). It’s like the intentional mixing of refined European breeds with wild dingoes in Australia that produced the smart and rangy Australian cattle dog.

At their extremes, capitalism and communism become equivalent: Endless toil motivated by lapidary ideals handed down by a revered and unquestioned leader, and put into practice by a leadership caste selected for its adherence to aforementioned principles, and richly rewarded for its willingness to grind whatever human grist the mill required? Same in both. A (mostly) pliant media that flatters the existing system of production, framing it as the only such system possible? Check! Foot soldiers who sacrifice their families and personal lives for the efficient running of the system, and who view their sole human value through the prism of advancement within that system? Welcome to the People’s Republic of Facebook.

As the ever-sagacious @gselevator quoted: in communism people made lines for bread, while in capitalism they make lines for iPhones.

The reality is that capitalism, communism, and every other sweeping ideology feed off the same human drives—the founder’s or revolutionary’s narcissistic will to power, and the mass man’s desire to be part of something bigger than himself—even if with very different outcomes. National Socialism, Technofuturism, Bolshevism, the Islamic State, Pan-Arabism, la Commune, Jonestown, the Crusades, la mission civilisatrice, the white man’s burden, evangelical Christianity, Manifest Destiny, Spanish Falangism, the Church of Latter-day Saints, the Cuban Revolution—the villain with a thousand faces, yoking together the monomaniac’s twitchy urge and the follower’s hunger for a role in some captivating story.

Basically, energy drinks like Monster were a proxy for that flavor of lunkheaded younger male who played those moronic mob assassination games that were popular in social gaming’s heyday, and are now mostly forgotten. It was a Facebook version of the “beer and diapers” truism, cleverly obvious in that way marketers love.

How long could the museum convince anyone living to look at the stuffed dead, I wondered. Facebook & Co., to whom the museum was pimping out its august real estate, was busily working to nuke the human mind of the necessary attention span.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. —Edward Abbey, The Journey Home

What makes a user use the product does not necessarily make money, and the reverse is also true. In fact, they’re anticorrelated in general, and you can drive engagement or make money, but not both at once.

The biggest thing going on in marketing right now, what is generating tens of billions of dollars in investment and endless scheming inside the bowels of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple, is the puzzle of how to tie these different sets of names together, and who controls the links. That’s it. Other than this Game of Thrones power struggle among the great digital powers to control identity, targeting, and attribution, everything else is a parasitic sideshow scarcely worth the hassle of following.

But behind it all there’s a single person: a nervous ball of needs, wants, and anxieties, whose species evolved in a Paleolithic world of toothy predators and the hunter-gatherer feast-famine duality, and who is presently confronted, a mere blip of time later, with an endless feast of blinking lights and hyperoptimized stimuli. Can you blame the poor beasts for clicking themselves to death with Candy Crush Saga, or maniacally (and frictionlessly) squandering resources they don’t have on things they don’t need? The real unmet challenge here is reconciling all those various names for that one fidgety brain. This is what we figured out in 2012. This is why Facebook invested such an extraordinary amount of time, money, and people in its biggest ads-related acquisition to date, Atlas (and much more on that soon enough).

Media publishers like Facebook and Google are just more efficient versions of the post office. They deliver a message for money.

Facebook, Google, and others have achieved the holy grail of all marketers: a high-fidelity, persistent, and immutable pseudonym for every consumer online. Even better, they’ve joined that to your real-world persona, the one that shows up bleary-eyed at two a.m. at a Target in El Cerrito looking for tampons or a six-pack of Natural Light.