Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

So what idea were we pitching exactly? The short answer: it didn’t matter. Like the canniest early-stage investors, YC cared a lot more about the team at this point than whatever improbable idea we might have. The latter was really there only to judge the former; it was valueless in itself. Don’t believe me? Think your idea is worth something? Go and try to sell it, and see what sort of price you’ll get for it. Ideas without implementation, or without an exceptional team to implement them, are like assholes and opinions: everyone’s got one. Incidentally, the fastest way you can indicate your level of startup naïveté to a VC (or to anybody in tech), is either by claiming you’re in “stealth”—that is, with an idea so secretly valuable you can’t disclose it—or by forcing someone to sign a nondisclosure agreement before you even discuss it. You may as well tattoo LOSER on your forehead instead, to save everyone the trouble. To quote one Valley sage, if your idea is any good, it won’t get stolen, you’ll have to jam it down people’s throats instead. For the record, though, here’s what we came up with: One of the great challenges in marketing is the divide between the online and the offline worlds. What you buy via the Internet and your digital persona is completely separate from what you buy in person, and the two data streams rarely cross. Imagine if an advertiser knew you bought SUV-sized packages of diapers at your local Walmart; how would it target different Internet ads at y...