Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

Add in two dozen other gearhead degenerates going apeshit along with you on the track, and you’ve got yourself a ten-lap ticket straight to your own mental redline. When you finally pull off the track into the pits, your overheated car will reek of burnt brake and clutch, your damp clothes are glued with sweat to your skin, and you’ll remove your driving gloves with shaking hands. The adrenaline crash will hit, and you’ll be reminded of the moments after your first fight, or your first real fuck.

the saying goes, so in the meantime I got down to the serious business, as some product managers do, of trying to bang my product marketing manager.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. —Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle

As the ever-sagacious @gselevator quoted: in communism people made lines for bread, while in capitalism they make lines for iPhones. Sure, iPhones are better than bread, and the standard of living in capitalist countries is clearly higher, but the lived experiences of either, from the point of view of the working proles, bears more than a passing resemblance.

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

Money follows eyeballs, even if slowly.

All ambitious men want either to please their fathers or to punch them in the goddamned face.

He represented the best in Facebook engineering: irreverence without disrespect, competence without arrogance, ambition without ego.

I still remember our first meeting with Experian.* They didn’t know what the hell was up, and I’m sure whoever Boland or Rob Daniel (our business-development guy) first contacted was probably the wrong entry point to the company, but the net of it was they sent out a relatively junior B team.

“Sheryl recruited and convinced me.” Ah. That might explain why his lips were hermetically sealed to her ass. “How’d that go?” “Well, she basically convinced me by saying: ‘Look, I either hire you now and you come work for Facebook, or a year from now I’ll hire you to work for the guy whose job I’m offering you right now.’ And that’s what convinced me.”

Here is your lesson from the Facebook IPO: whenever you see the headline “Stock X Pops on First Day of Trading and Declared a Success,” instead think “Founders and employees just got completely screwed, and the bankers and their wealthy clients made fortunes.” Because that’s what happened, and didn’t happen, in the case of Facebook.

But here is where I shamefully displayed my naïveté. For someone who had spotted the resemblance between Goldman Sachs and Facebook within an hour of meeting the latter, I had forgotten my lessons learned at the former. When it came to monetization, Facebook had no interest in real innovation. It liked its faxes. Like any large company, Facebook would always aim to create monopoly pricing power and maintain information asymmetry, rather than drive true innovation. If Facebook played with the outside world, it always played with loaded dice.

Quod licet Bozi, non licet bovi. Gods may do what cattle may not.

Roughly half of Google queries don’t generate ads in the space next to them; test it yourself.

For my part, outside of physics textbooks, I found Truth to be a rather rare commodity, particularly in the tech world. I had also noticed that those who most made a big show of believing in Truth were unusually attached to whatever well-groomed pack of lies they held dear.

For every beautiful woman, there’s a man tired of screwing her. —Latin American proverb

Always show enough skin to get a second date. If in doubt, show more.

What Twitter was asking was just shy of a breach of confidentiality, and absolute corporate treason. Just shy, which was how Silicon Valley worked.

To Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Sam Altman, and the rest of the Y Combinator partners and founders involved in the AdGrok saga. In a Valley world awash with mammoth greed and opportunism masquerading as beneficent innovation, you were the only real loyalty and idealism I ever encountered.

Important Facebook partners (Apple, Amazon, Zynga, etc.) had permanent liaison staff assigned to them, almost like how the US State Department appoints ambassadors to foreign nations. Their role in life was not only representing Facebook’s views to (often) antagonistic outside powers, but also stumping for an outside company’s interests to an often oblivious Facebook. They also helped the other company navigate Facebook’s Byzantine internal politics to achieve some mutually beneficial goal. These ambassadors got to know their foreign powers very well, some even going a bit native (as diplomats too long in a foreign country do), empathizing with their charges’ agenda as much as with Facebook’s.

“One really destroys only what one replaces.” The author is Napoleon III, on overthrowing the Second French Republic and replacing it with the Second French Empire.