Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

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.

Don’t work for the survivors or architects of massacres.

When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed?

The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed.

Brickhouse Café,

Creamery)

Crissy Field,

28 Days Later

Wilson Sonsini

Sam Altman

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

Second, the ability to take and endure endless amounts of shit. I was raised under the sadistic care of a sister ten years my senior who delighted in unleashing endless taunts and abuses.

Incidentally, it helps to have enemies. While love is a beautiful emotion, far more empires have been built, books written, wrongs righted, fights won, and ambitions realized out of vengeful desire to prove some critic wrong, or existential dread of some perceived enemy, than all the love in the world. Love is grand, but hate and fear last longer.

Before you sit down with people on whom your entire financial future and that of your descendants will depend, you should know them better than their mothers do. Know what they want—whether money, power, social approval of various flavors, or merely a comfortable life—and you can predict 90 percent of what they eventually do.

API is “application programming interface,” and it’s the set of functions and subroutines that an outside party can run in order to build its own third-party services on top of a company’s service.

Michel Houellebecq.

What a company builds (SVP, Product), how it builds it (SVP, Engineering), how that eventual product is operationally run (COO), and what other companies it buys (Corp Dev): those are the core functions of any large tech company, and the people from the Ads team we met during forty-eight busy hours in 2011 would, by 2015, be that core leadership of Twitter.

almost as if it were in an online forum. The macros are geek emoticons, a witty or instructive image or GIF often reminiscent of kitschy Internet memes. There are hundreds of them, and they are like a rebus of engineering commentary, either encouraging someone to boldly ship a new feature, or pejoratively insulting some code-writer’s ability. At the time, typing “bluetape” produced an image of a piece of blue masking tape on a wall, indicating that a piece of code should be removed for the sake of aesthetics and/or sanity. 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

woman who enjoyed baked goods.

didn’t get that . . . or much of anything in the meeting

Katherine Losse’s so-so firsthand account of life at early Facebook, The Boy Kings,

neck and neck. Since about December, though, and

won’t

Gartrell and

I linked