Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

To paraphrase the very quotable Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, in the future there will be two types of jobs: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

In all my experience in both startups and large companies, including and especially at Facebook, I would always prefer—a hundred times prefer—being subject to the rigors of the market, the fickleness of luck, and the whims of users than to navigate the popularity-contest politics of a large company, surrounded by the mediocre duffers who’ve succeeded in life through nothing more than guile and appearances. Scott Weinstein’s unfortunate example was the best advice he (or anyone else) has ever given me, and one that I ignored to my extreme peril.

want to be a startup entrepreneur, get used to negotiating from positions of weakness. I’d soon have

In the midst of it all you must take your stand, good-temperedly and without disdain, yet always aware that a man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

The first sign of trouble was an externally visible one, a symptom that any suitably experienced startup practitioner could have detected: nobody from the early days of the company was still around other than Murthy. Every other single cofounder or early employee had left. As Vonnegut wrote in Bluebeard, never trust the survivor of a massacre until you know what he did to survive. And indeed in this case, Murthy wasn’t a mere survivor, but rather an author of said massacre.

Adchemy made something like $6 million per month selling mortgage leads to Quicken Loans, and online education leads to the University of Phoenix

In the same way that a trust fund just makes a drug addict’s spiral more long lasting and painful, a cash-generating business that doesn’t improve the product postpones the inevitable by floating the charade, all the while actually making failure more likely.

Craigslist was for escorts, fat chicks in Fremont, and serial killers. OkCupid was for penniless hipster chicks who lived in shared flats in the Mission. Match.com was for professional women busy with the time-honored tradition of husband shopping.

Whoever doesn’t have revolutionary genes, or doesn’t have revolutionary blood. Whoever doesn’t have the courage, heart, or brain that adapts itself to the effort and heroism of the revolution. Let them go! We don’t want them! We don’t need them! —Fidel Castro, speech at Mariel, Cuba, May 1980

One of Mark Twain’s more uplifting quotes maintains that small people always belittle your ambitions, while the great make you feel that you too can be great.

Engineers can be so smart about code, and yet so dense about human motivations. They’d be better served by reading less Neal Stephenson and more Shakespeare and Patricia Highsmith.

Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens. Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it. Company culture is what goes without saying. There are no real rules, only laws. Success forgives all sins. People who leak to you, leak about you. Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade. Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society. Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics. Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities. Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player—investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer—is complicit.

If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training, you will be a weapon, you will be a minister of death, praying for war. But until that day you are pukes. You’re the lowest form of life on Earth. You are not even human fucking beings. You are nothing but unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit! —R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman Full Metal Jacket (1987)

People go into startups thinking that the technical problems are the challenges. In practice, the technical stuff is easy, unless you’re incompetent or really at the hairy edge of human knowledge—for example, putting a man on Mars. No, every real problem in startups is a people problem, and as such they’re the hardest to solve, as they often don’t have a real solution, much less a ready software fix. Startups are experiments in group psychology. As CEO, you’re both the therapist leader, and the patient most in need of therapy. As Geoff Ralston, a YC partner, told us: people don’t really change, they just become better actors. For all the existential challenges you’ll watch us face in the coming pages, it was no external enemy that would eventually do in AdGrok. No. It was our very natures, the men we saw in the mirror every morning.

If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough. —Mario Andretti, Formula One driver

Remember how in high school there was a clique of popular kids, always the center of attention, scoring the cheerleaders, and so on? And remember how five years later you came back to your hometown, and randomly ran into one of those people with a name tag and a powder-blue oxford, working as assistant manager at the local Walmart? Or maybe he was already married to that cheerleader, who had gained sixty pounds after squeezing out three kids, and they now lived boring lives in the same sort of dumpy, suburban home you’d been ambitious enough to escape? Or perhaps the outcome wasn’t grim: the valedictorian with his curated portfolio of admissions-winning extracurriculars ends up as an equal peer at your prestige company ten years down the line, just like you. Startups are like that too.

One quick way to cut through the shit: ask your pretender-to-influence, “Do you have decision-making power?” If he or she even remotely hesitates or hedges, you’re speaking to a lackey (whether he or she acts like one or not).

The Monday partner meeting is the cadence to which the entire venture-backed technology world dances. At that meeting, which typically lasts a good four to five hours, starting early and running to midafternoon with a break for lunch, the business of the venture partnership is done. Updates on existing portfolio companies are given by the relevant partners (who as often as not will have a board seat), invited entrepreneurs pitch at what’s likely the most important hour of their life, and new potential deals are floated. Since this was a small seed deal, chump change really, I didn’t need to come in and pitch to the assembled high and mighty (fortunately).

With VCs the yesses are usually immediate, while the nos are typically slow to arrive, if they arrive at all. If the partners reacted warmly at Monday’s meeting, we’d get a call or email that very evening. If they didn’t . . . well, he’d get to writing us an email at some point during the week, and all we could do was wait.

As Sun Tzu informs us, no matter how cowardly by nature, anyone fights to the death when his back is against the wall. A wise combatant always allows his opponent a way out,

Here is a key insight for any startup: You may think yourself a puny midget among giants when you stride out into a marketplace, and suddenly confront such a giant via litigation or direct competition. But the reality is that larger companies often have much more to fear from you than you from them.

To say Murthy was punished for his one iota of kindness would be an understatement. The lesson here is: if you’re going to be an egomaniacal, sociopathic prick, then do it properly and murder your enemies outright, rather than throw them a bone and expect to kill them later if there is trouble. They might just turn that bone into a weapon.

Fast-forward thirty-five years: Gates now tours Africa as a great philanthropist and single-handedly cures malaria. Kildall eventually succumbed to alcoholism, dying in mysterious circumstances—probably a drunken brawl—in a Monterrey biker bar at age fifty-two. To quote Balzac, “The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime, as the crime was properly done.” Never was a crime better concealed.

Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death. —Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX

The harsh reality is this: to have influence in the world, you need to be willing and able to reward your friends and punish your enemies.

Whenever you face some stressful, time-consuming, and risky challenge, firewall the rest of the company away from the mess. They’ll likely add no value, and the attendant uncertainty will corrode their productivity when you likely need it most. No matter what happens in the outside world—lawsuit, money issues, the fucking zombie apocalypse—do not let it infect the company’s headspace and become the top item in the internal narrative.

But in the passive-aggressive popularity contest that is Silicon Valley, someone actually going to bat for you—really going to bat, like telling important people to go fuck themselves—that’s rarer and more short-lived than a snowflake in a bonfire.

First, the ability to monomaniacally and obsessively focus on one thing and one thing only, at the expense of everything else in life.

I observe that some men, like bad runners in the stadium, abandon their purposes when close to the goal; while it is at that particular point, more than at any other, that others secure the victory over their rivals. —Polybius, Histories

Walking into any meeting, you should know every goddamn thing there is to know about the other person; if you don’t, you’re failing.

Jessica introduced us. “So what are you working on?” he asked, taking a valuable minute out of his day. In a panic, I realized I hadn’t brought my AdGrok laptop to lunch, and was therefore not ready for an impromptu demo. FAIL! Always be closing, motherfucker.

(As the hardened SoMa veteran joke goes: the homeless have Android phones, while the techies have iPhones.)

If a local app like Uber makes it big, taxi drivers in Paris and Mexico City will be rioting and sending bricks through cars’ windshields. If Uber wins, Madrid taxi drivers’ wives will be weeping and wondering what’s for dinner.

Is it a reasonable thing, I ask you, for a grown man to run about and hit a ball? Poker’s the only game fit for a grown man. Then your hand is against every man and every man’s hand is against yours. Team-work? Who ever made a fortune by team-work? There’s only one way to make a fortune and that’s to down the fellow who’s up against you. —W. Somerset Maugham, “Straight Flush”

If you can only be good at one thing, be good at lying . . . because if you’re good at lying, you’re good at everything. —@gselevator, July 25, 2013

If humanity had waited until 2010 to invent masturbation, it would not have caught on as fast as CityVille. That’s how fast Facebook could make something happen.

If you want to seduce a beautiful woman, court her ugly sister. —Spanish proverb

Phone calls are yesses, emails are nos.

SF is a city populated mostly by pussies, so finding a decent street race is difficult. The driver was older and paunchy, but expensively dressed—my guess was real estate or some form of old-boys’ entrepreneurship like an ad agency. Electric cars make a revving challenge impossible, so not really expecting a reaction, I just punched it when I came alongside him.

Pedram was here to expound on those same values. We had gotten the prophetic vision from Cox, precisely the sort of seductive propagandizing a product person does. Now it was time to hear about the martial virtues that would make that vision a reality, which was the engineer’s duty. A tall, broad-shouldered figure in a Facebook T-shirt who looked as though he worked out, Pedram commanded us in a hectoring tone: “Whatever you learned at your previous job, whatever politics and bullshit you’re bringing with you, just leave all that shit behind.”

The most pitiful sight in the Facebook Ads team was the PMs who had lost the confidence of their engineers. Nominally in charge of some product area, they were like the government in exile of some occupied nation: sitting there with all the pomp of their position, sending emails and road maps hither and yon, and yet producing nothing. Internally, it was a demeaning, groveling job.

Any culture able to shut itself off from the outside world goes insane in its own unique way, and Facebook had essentially done that with its Ads team. But as on Wall Street, where even someone who knew the correct price of a security couldn’t go against the will of the market, you couldn’t question the reigning insanity. And so one went along.

By itself, genius can produce original thoughts just as little as a woman by herself can bear children. Outward circumstances must come to fructify genius, and be, as it were, a father to its progeny. —Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Genius,” The Art of Literature

Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money, and really, really will not stop until every man, woman, and child on earth is staring into a blue-framed window with a Facebook logo. Which, if you think about it, is much scarier than simple greed. The greedy man can always be bought at some price or another, and his behavior is predictable. But the true zealot? He can’t be had at any price, and there’s no telling what his mad visions will have him and his followers do.

Sometimes you don’t finish a product, you merely abandon any hope of presently improving it, and out the door it goes. Product managers must either apply the brakes to impatient engineers who want their creations to see the light of day, or conversely, whip and drive to get perfectionist engineers to stop mucking with the code and procure some real users already.

The perfect is very often the enemy of the good, and as the Facebook poster screamed from every wall: DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT. Very few companies have died due to launching early; at worst, you’ll have a onetime product embarrassment (as Apple did with the first version of its iPhone Maps app). However, countless companies have died by losing the nerve to ship, and freezing into a coma of second-guessing, hesitation, and internal indecision. As in life, so in business: maintain a bias for action over inaction.

There are 3 universal symbols on this planet: the dollar sign $, tits, and the soccer ball. —Po Bronson, “Game Day at San Quentin”

But the first rule of startups is also true of any fast-paced, competitive workplace like Facebook: act like you belong there, even if you don’t.

The content was either more storied Facebook lore (that time engineers convinced journalists Facebook was shipping a Fax button that would fax your photos), or tastefully typeset excerpts from the gospel according to Facebook (“The quick shall inherit the earth”; “We don’t build services to make money, we make money to build services”).

If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. “Embracing change” isn’t enough. It has to be so hardwired into who we are that even talking about it seems redundant. The Internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.