Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

The last symptom of terminal illness, counterintuitively enough, is loyal employees.

when the company’s employee retention strategy is cultivating Stockholm syndrome, you’re in the wrong company.

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

Here’s some startup pedagogy for you: When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed? If the answer is zero, you’re not looking at a startup, you’re just dealing with a regular business like a laundry or a trucking business. All you need is capital and minimal execution, and assuming a two-way market, you’ll make some profit.

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

Back to me skulking at Adchemy while working on a Y Combinator application. If my reading of YC’s and Paul Graham’s essays was correct, then bomb-throwing anarchist subversive mixed with cold-blooded execution mixed with irreverent whimsy, a sort of technology-enabled twelve-year-old boy, was precisely the YC entrepreneur profile. Figure out a point of overlooked business or technical leverage, interpose some piece of cleverness, and gleefully marvel at the resulting disruption

After all, echoing the eminent philosopher G. Marx: How good can a club be if it’s willing to have lowly me as a member?

As Geoff Ralston, a YC partner, told us: people don’t really change, they just become better actors.