Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world. —Stefan Zweig, Chess Story

These are the only real values we have left in the twilight of history, the tired dead end of liberal democratic capitalism, at least here in the California fringes of Western civilization.

Would the inevitable descendants of that cheering courtyard crowd one day gather with their forebears, perhaps in front of a fireplace, and ask, “Hey, Grandpa, what was it like to be at the Facebook IPO?” the way previous generations asked about Normandy or the settling of the Western frontier? I doubt it.

meaning FBX advertisers tended to win the auction for users’ attention more often. Of course their bids were higher: FBX bidders knew you had just spec’ed out a Jack Spade handbag or had bought diapers last week; Facebook by contrast knew you had liked Jim Carrey’s fan page a year ago.

The specific team involved was called A9, which was the Amazon subsidiary wholly responsible for that behemoth’s search and advertising technologies.* Effectively, it was the private, in-house technology shop that built Amazon’s own DSP, the brokerage house that let Amazon buy ads anywhere on the Internet to drive you back to your Amazon shopping cart.

And all of it implemented with three engineers and one cocky product manager, and not the roomful of bickering, big-company clowns that every meeting on the matter tended to feature.

The genius of the container is that the entire workflow around transporting physical goods is standardized on the same 8×8×40 box. Manufacturers load goods onto eight-foot-wide palettes straight into the box. The box becomes a freight car when loaded onto railroad wheels, and once it arrives at a ship, it is directly hefted aboard via those immense cranes that dot every modern port. Piled like Legos on the ship, the boxes arrive at another port and are loaded onto a truck frame, and are driven to their destinations. It’s universal: whether the ship docks in Singapore or Oakland, its cargo will be swiftly loaded and unloaded via the magic of containerization. Intermodal containers make our global supply chain possible.

What’s it like to be a Gokul or a Boland or a Fischer? You’ve seen excellent engineers and product people come and go, as your recruiters land the best new grads from every leading school. Your privileged position inside a powerful and market-leading organization exposes you to every industry trend and player, and pads your network with a roster of power and influence. Your ability to make any company’s senior management appear and deliver fawning and revealing product demos means you know everything that’s going on in your industry, down to the color of the clickable buttons in the products. And yet there you are, lips bolted like pipe flanges onto some bigwig’s ass, plodding along like an ox yoked to a grain mill, grinding the grist the big-company machine requires.

It’s because you are without a doubt the least daring and least innovative person at your organization, because in the opportunity-rich environment in which you live, the ambitious and capable have left to pursue it. There’s a negative selection in which the cream (or whatever it is that initially rises) gets constantly skimmed off, and you are what’s left after years of continual skimming. Changing from big company A to big company B is cosmetic, as it’s of course at least a lateral move if not a step up. You learn that what matters in a big company is to avoid falling victim to firing or layoffs, and to appear important and critical to the company’s mission. You have mastered the art of “managing up”: namely, controlling the feelings and perceptions of the management layer above you. You take feedback well, and make sure to be seen speedily acting on that feedback. If you have reports, you champion their careers internally (make sure they know you’re doing that), and try to mold them into people like yourself, who are organizationally effective and recognized as such. In all but the most pathological organizations, your reports’ success will reflect well on you and create your own success. You make sure to form allegiances and friendships with your peer managers, particularly in organizations like sales or business development that you’ll need to push your business agenda forward. When there’s an ineffective and incompetent member in the organization, rather than calling...

Best to wait until the sixteenth, and see those shares resting quietly in my Schwab account before quitting.

A fully turned out member of the deuxième sexe in a conference room was as clear an angel of death as a short-barreled .38 Special revolver.

The newspaper people turned digital publishers were still rubbing the newsprint off their hands as they tried to figure out “this Internet thing,” while the marketers inside leading games companies knew their CACs and LTVs out to three decimals.

Facebook regeared the entire Ads team to focus on mobile, squeezing every advertiser, big and small, to spend as much as possible on Facebook mobile ads. It was one of those instantaneous pivots that were breathtaking in their speed and focus, with an agility that had saved Facebook more than once in the past, and of which the company could be justly proud. Not many public companies of that size, if any, could have pulled off such a sudden course change.

That’s the nature of Valley success, however: you try ten things, based mostly on random hunches, a few key product insights, and whatever internal mythologies your culture reveres. Seven of them fail miserably, are discontinued, and are soon quietly swept under the rug of “forever today” forgetfulness. Two do OK, for more or less the reasons you thought, but they don’t blow the doors off your success metric. And one, for reasons you discover only after the fact, becomes a huge, transformational success. The amnesiac tech press weaves the narrative fallacy around the proceedings, fabricating a make-believe dramatic arc from steely-eyed product ideation to flawless and unhesitating technical execution. What was an improbable bonanza at the hands of the flailing half-blind becomes the inevitable coup of the assured visionary. The world crowns you a genius, and you start acting like one. When the next usage or revenue crisis hits, you repeat the experiment, rolling your set of product dice on the big Valley table. At some point, you don’t find the crisis-solving winner, the dealer sweeps up your remaining chips, and you’re busted. The company fails and your logo is recycled as a reminder of corporate mortality. Then everyone wonders how such a confirmed genius could have possibly failed, and ruminates on the transience of talent.